


Abandon the Dark

by sirenalley



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Consensual, Dysfunctional Family, Explicit Sexual Content, Fear of Discovery, Guilt, Incest, M/M, Pining, Plot, Politics, Possessive Behavior, Sexual Tension, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-14
Updated: 2020-07-17
Packaged: 2021-03-04 02:41:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 34,666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24726172
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sirenalley/pseuds/sirenalley
Summary: On the brink of ruin, Itachi is forced to make a decision that will change the course of the future: he aids his father, and the entire Uchiha clan, in the operation of a coup d'état against the leaders of Konoha. Following its success, he must bear witness to what becomes of his beloved village while recognizing his own responsibility in its creation.Worse still, his relationship with his younger brother has grown fraught and distant over the years, burdened both by their father's influence and Itachi's own conscience. Bridging the gulf between them seems an impossible task.
Relationships: Uchiha Fugaku & Uchiha Itachi, Uchiha Fugaku & Uchiha Sasuke, Uchiha Itachi & Uchiha Sasuke, Uchiha Itachi/Uchiha Sasuke
Comments: 57
Kudos: 189





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Small note on the extent of canon divergence: Sasuke is 10 and Itachi is 15 in this first part, then 17-18 and 22-23 respectively through the rest. Additionally, I did not include Itachi's illness, since it didn't fit into the plot. (I invented a legitimate excuse for this, but that's another story.)
> 
> I originally had a playlist for this fic, but I drilled it down to just two: "And All That Could Have Been" by Nine Inch Nails (truly part of the inspiration) and "Genesis" by Nightcrawler (which is what I looped on repeat through 80% of writing this). Maybe someone else will enjoy them too.
> 
> This is all done and I'll be posting as I complete final edits! Work and some other circumstances may slow me down, but it'll get there. Thanks for reading!

_“When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.”_  
— Ursula K. Le Guin

PART I.

—

Alone, Itachi lay on his back and studied the featureless wood grain of the ceiling. When the sharingan bled his sight red, he could see a cut-out projection of the sky, chakra threading his system with the grim satisfaction of an altered view. He sensed his stamina flagging, and still he cycled through its activation and deactivation like paging a book open and shut: one moment a crimson world unspun in the heavens, the next it was gone, future veiled in grey.

The events of the past twenty-four hours played out in his memory. Itachi sensed emotion drifting at the bottom of his mind like silt in a lake, undisturbed and distilled. 

Somewhere he knew his father was addressing the clan, certainty boiling within the center of himself. It was a reality he did not yet wish to face.

The late hour verged on the boundary of dawn. Outside there would be pale daggers of daylight in the clouds and dew on the grass, but Itachi had drawn the curtains over his window panes—he sensed no clear measure of time. In this bleak room, it stretched limitless and undefined. 

Itachi allowed his mind to sink. His hands and head ached in a slow percussive pulse, calluses blistered on palms, and his pool of chakra rippled critically low each time he accessed sharingan to look up. Physical exhaustion nagged his body. It had taken laborious effort earlier in the washroom to scrub himself of blood; Itachi suspected his mother would be doing laundry for the better part of the morning. 

The door to his room opened, panel sliding with a clack of wood. He didn’t require chakra to tell the invader. Careful socked feet crossed tatami mats, trespassing as a timid mouse in a jungle. Itachi closed his eyes; the sky through the ceiling vanished.

“Sasuke,” he said. 

“Nii-san, you’re awake.” His younger brother’s voice was uncertain. Was he expecting to be reprimanded for sneaking into his older brother’s bedroom without permission? “I’m sorry.” 

So he was.

“It’s all right. Are you scared?” Itachi turned and opened his eyes, irises returned to an ordinary black. “Something strange is happening right now, and you don’t understand it.”

Sasuke climbed onto the bed, mattress dipping with the additional weight. He stretched on top of the blankets in a vertical mirror of his older brother’s position. They simply looked at one another for a moment, then Itachi rolled back over.

The silence begged his attention as much as it offered an alien comfort. 

“Come here,” he surrendered, extending one hand into the gap between them. He coaxed Sasuke into his arms. Initially loose, the hold soon tightened. It was a platonic signal of affection more than they had shared since memory could recall. 

His younger brother squirreled closer and pressed into the heart of his chest, little hands splayed over the front of his sleeping shirt. He seemed tiny in the cradle of Itachi’s arms. Ten years old now. Still a child, though Itachi had no instinct for how his brother’s experience at this age was outside his own. 

Sasuke was a child—yet he was someone who shared his blood and his name, closer than anyone else.

A child who did or didn’t fully comprehend the pieces in motion beyond these four walls. A child who, in innocence and ignorance, went to seek reassurance from the individual responsible for permanently altering their lives.

“Nii-san, can I stay here?”

He heard himself say, “Of course.”

They remained folded in one another’s embrace, in that timeless grey place, until at last Itachi felt the gauzy promise of sleep. He let out a slow breath. Exhaustion was a dragging and persistent lure. His arms relaxed around Sasuke as he stared at the opposite wall, sharingan falling across his sight one last time. 

His mother’s presence drifted down the hall as she went about her morning routine, chakra little more than a pale wispy flake. He could see her carrying a basket of bundled laundry. 

Sasuke stirred but did not wake from his tucked position. Itachi blinked back to blackness. When he finally slept, unconsciousness was an undertow so violent he could do nothing to prevent its totality. He didn’t dream.

—

Two days later, Itachi stood in the Hokage’s office and fixed his attention on a singular point by the window. He couldn’t see out with the curtains closed, but he imagined what might be there if only he could: Konoha a sprawling green jewel at the center of mountainous terrain, dense forested wilderness and streaming rivers in every cardinal direction. The Hokage Rock alone stood vigilant guardian over its glory.

His father cleared his throat, so Itachi turned and pigeonholed his mind back into this room, this conversation.

“I am proud of you,” Fugaku went on. He sat behind the Hokage’s desk with both elbows planted and hands interlaced. It was blatant posturing, but as the Hokage was dead, it didn’t matter. No one here would challenge it. “We couldn’t have done this without your help, Itachi.”

Somewhere to his left, Yashiro yawned through a stretch. 

“We should also allow ourselves some congratulations and celebration,” Fugaku said. “I’ve notified the rest of the clan as to what has occurred. We’re in agreement, but we should still take things slowly for now. It pays to be cautious. The ground we tread is unsteady, but so long as we stick by each other’s side we will see ourselves to greater victory.”

“I could sleep for a week,” Yashiro said. “Fugaku! It’s surreal, I had to pinch myself this morning. We really did it.”

“Indeed we did. Don’t get too excited yet, we have a lot of work ahead of us.”

“Cut yourself some slack. I’ll get Inabi, we’ll go out for drinks…”

“A later time.” Fugaku’s gaze fell onto his oldest son, causing Itachi to bend beneath it, head bowed and longing to vanish. “Now more than ever, I am glad to have you as my son.”

Itachi looked again sightlessly at the blinds.

“Are you relieved? You can be open with me, my son, there’s no need to lie. I have always wanted that for us.”

Yashiro sneered as he said, “Your kid’s surprised by all this too. It’s a good thing he saw reason.”

“Without Itachi, we never would have succeeded in this.” Fugaku glanced to the other Uchiha man. “I have counted my blessings, believe me when I say that. I’m fortunate to have a talented son like Itachi.”

“Thank you, father,” Itachi said, sensing this expectation. He felt suddenly and deliriously sick. He feared he might empty his stomach onto his own shoes. A composure of sheer steel will kept it down, so he could refocus, fastening his mind onto the moment.

“Very well then.” 

Fugaku turned and picked up the Hokage’s hat from the desk, then set it over his own head. It looked strange on him. The cloth hung down, casting stern features into the depth of shadow.

“Itachi, you may be excused. Send in Inabi and the others—we have much to discuss.”

—

Their new home was spacious and well-furnished, bright afternoon light slanting in warm lines across the eaves and garden paths. Sasuke had completed an energetic circuit of the interior, slowing only long enough to accept a cup of chilled barley tea from his mother before he rebelled back to childlike excitement, mapping out the territory that would be theirs from now on.

Itachi watched all of this from his kneeling seat on the outside veranda. He turned, occasionally, when Sasuke would loop back around to make inane commentary. The rooms were all huge, but Itachi’s bedroom had the biggest closet, and that didn’t make sense, mother should have it because she wore more clothes than Itachi; or father’s study was a little scary, because it was at the end of a very long hall that had no windows, and he didn’t like that; or Itachi’s new mattress was really comfortable, and he had made sure it was big enough for them both to fit—a declarative statement that drew their mother’s attention from the kitchen.

“Sasuke, you have your own bed,” she scolded. “You need to give your brother his personal space, it’s important for someone his age.”

“I like nii-san’s bed.” Sasuke pouted. “I sleep better.”

Itachi’s fingers closed over the cup of tea in his lap, and he managed what he knew was a pale imitation of a smile when his brother looked in his direction for support. “I don’t mind it.”

“See,” Sasuke said, crossing his arms, all the world a stubborn ten-year-old demanding his way. “Itachi said he doesn’t mind.”

Their mother sighed, then stood, carrying the jug of tea back into the kitchen.

“Do you really sleep better?” 

“I wasn’t lying.”

“I didn’t say that.” Itachi set down his cup, gesturing with one hand. “Come here.”

Obediently his brother ducked forward, innocent and trusting, as Itachi pushed both index and middle fingers into his brow and caused him to flinch back. A little hand rubbed the spot. “You always _do_ that!”

“You should help mother finish unpacking,” he said to Sasuke, rising. This time the smile fixed itself more naturally as he went from the room.

—

The Uchiha compound nestled itself into a central area of Konoha, adjacent to the offices of the Hokage and thus providing closer access to its seat of power. A small contingent of Uchihas remained in the segregated area on the village’s boundary to oversee the administration of the Military Police Force; they already had the infrastructure for a municipal presence, so it made no sense to relocate everyone while the dust of the coup cleared. Naturally, this did not include Itachi and his family, given who had succeeded as the Fifth.

It wasn’t that Itachi disliked this change. He felt little for it at all. Yet the dense forestry and proximity to wilderness was lost at this new property, and it would have been an ideal place for Sasuke to grow up. There was privacy in nature, within those wide spaces best suited for training and adventure rather than the claustrophobia at the heart of an urban center. Unfortunately it was not his decision to make.

As he crossed the street on his return from an official ANBU debriefing, Itachi’s awareness swung to a group of young Academy students. They stood on the curb. Their eyes followed him with animal watchfulness. He could hear their voices lifting into the air even hushed behind hands.

“That’s an Uchiha,” a girl said. “One of the ones who…”

“Shh, he’s looking!” 

Itachi averted his gaze as he walked, intent to pass them by. He noticed how they shrunk back to avoid intersecting paths. As he turned the next corner, Itachi glanced over his shoulder in time to see the students dash out of view.

While he was not unused to public attention, it was the first he had seen pure, paralyzed fear in children not far from his own age. Itachi was cognizant enough to recognize what this meant, what it implied of the conversations likely being shared at the dinner table between families, the warnings to the young. 

It was expected in an environment so radically changed overnight. 

One grace came from the fact that, in its tenuous efficiency, Konoha was more or less temporarily stable. There was no immediate power vacuum when the Uchiha clan inserted themselves into the seats of all of Konoha’s dead council members. With the Hokage replaced, the Uchiha clan had jurisdiction over the entire village. While the other villages outside Fire Country would be paying attention, it did not necessarily put war on the near horizon, not unless Konoha cracked and fissured under the weight of the Uchiha, if it could not handle its obligations to its civilians and buckled under that pressure. 

Their biggest concern was, then, how the people of Konoha felt about this change. Itachi understood the current public opinion was not good; what he saw with his own eyes only confirmed this.

Itachi slowed as he reached their property. He entered, toed off his shoes at the entrance, and quietly called, “I’m home.”

His mother’s greeting carried in from the other room. Before he could follow it, he was met by Sasuke, his younger brother’s head popping into the entryway. “Nii-san, welcome back. Dinner’s ready.”

“All right, I’ll join you.”

He shared the meal with his family in relative peace. Fugaku was last to the table and first to leave, saying no more than a few words, and their mother did not press him. She spoke most next to Sasuke, discussing his day at the Academy to determine whether he’d finished his homework and what was on the agenda for tomorrow. “If you aren’t busy,” Mikoto addressed her eldest son, “I know Sasuke would love if you could look over his assignment tonight. He wants to make sure it’s done well.”

Sasuke’s face flushed. “Itachi doesn’t have time for that kind of thing.”

“I can take a look,” Itachi said. “It’s fine.”

It was difficult to witness his brother’s transparent excitement knowing the reason dwelled in past avoidance and deliberate distance. Since the success of the coup, he had allowed himself indulgences of brotherly affection, longing for moments of togetherness like now. It was no true wonder Sasuke would not be banished back to his own bed—here, Itachi was willing to participate in his schooling without excuses of _later_ or _next time_.

This was what he had gained on the other side of the decision: a continued relationship with his younger brother in answer to the desire not to be driven apart from him. Itachi recognized within himself the selfish need to see Sasuke become a great shinobi someday. He knew his own wanting to participate in that future, to help his brother become stronger, to train together, to carry out missions as one team. At times this fantasy of the future was the only truth Itachi possessed with any certainty. 

It did not feel possible he could have offered it for forfeit. It did not feel good, knowing he almost had. And yet he could not shake the needling wrongness, as though he’d gone through a door and entered a place he didn’t recognize, but he no longer had the ability to turn around and leave.

Itachi helped his mother clean up after they were finished, then went to bathe, and when he finally arrived at his bedroom Sasuke was already there. His younger brother held a book open in his lap. “This problem is bothering me… can you make sure I did it right?”

“Here, let me see.”

An hour later the work was set aside, and the two brothers lay in bed, Sasuke’s head pillowed on Itachi’s arm fast asleep. Itachi’s mind lingered awake. He stared off, stirring when he sensed movement in the hall and heard the voices of his parents. Though the words drifted in low tones, Itachi gathered their meaning and topic: it was about him and Sasuke.

“Again, tonight…” 

“I’ve talked to him, but he’s too stubborn,” his mother said softly. “Itachi didn’t seem to mind.”

“Itachi is spoiling him when he should be learning to become independent at this age.”

“He’s still young. They’re a lot closer lately, and…” 

“No. Itachi has a responsibility as an older brother, and he isn’t setting a good example by encouraging this behavior. Be more firm with Sasuke.”

“Hm.”

“I don’t want this to become distracting.”

The reply was lost to footsteps moving further away, vanishing down the corridor even as he strained to listen.

Itachi held himself still for several moments afterward. He didn’t breathe. Sasuke continued to slumber in the crook of his arm, an oblivious warmth of companionship—and eventually each muscle in his body eased under the temptation of fatigue, willing his mind at last to follow.

—

The first public conflict Itachi witnessed came late that fall, outside the Hokage’s offices.

A faint chill hung in the air, and all of Konoha’s trees were beginning to color and die in shades of golden red, shedding leaves into piles across sidewalks and streets as a sign of winter’s approach. Itachi had dressed himself in a thermal layer before he left, early enough the sky remained dormant grey. When he reached his workplace, he noticed a waiting congregation of shinobi all in uniform of varying rank.

He slowed his steps and came to a halt. One of the men was standing closer to the doors of the building’s entrance, and when he noticed Itachi’s arrival, his expression collapsed into a dark sneer. “There’s one of them now. An Uchiha, and better yet, it’s _that_ one. The so-called Fifth’s watchdog.”

Itachi remained silent, watching.

“We aren’t going to allow it,” the man said as he approached, older than Itachi by some years, broader and taller, experience of combat in the story of his face. “You think you can just push us out and make everyone obey? We won’t let the Uchiha clan take over the village.”

A chorus of agreement rang from the crowd. When Itachi again showed no response, the mob’s temperament worsened, enraged by inaction.

“You can’t kill everyone,” a new voice cut in, and Itachi looked, but he could not tell from where it came—it was as though the entire crowd spoke as one, an illusion of singularity hidden within this legion of shinobi. “We live here too, we’re all Konoha’s shinobi, and without us you wouldn’t have a village.”

“You don’t control us!” they demanded as one, furious. “We won’t let you do this.”

He noticed it now. Bloodlust became thick and filmy in the air, familiar to him for how often he’d encountered it on the field. He knew its presence. 

Itachi’s shoulders drew tight across, confronted by several trained shinobi, chakra signatures knit into a contentious force. He did the mercenary calculation in his mind. It was possible he could hold ground until intervention arrived, or perhaps flee at the risk of inciting further anger, even pursuit—but it would remove the shinobi from this location. That was his first and primary concern. They were on a public street in plain view of onlookers and bystanders, all potential defenseless collateral to a violent dispute. 

As Itachi’s immediate view was eclipsed by the reddened face of the shinobi leader, reluctance rose up within himself. He could not will his body forward. 

It was as if Mukai stood once more before him and Shisui, a challenge of sheer grit and skill—only now he had no motivation. These weren’t spies or interlopers; they were Konoha’s loyal shinobi. 

It would be the same as attacking a comrade, someone on his own team, an act so grossly unnecessary here he couldn’t imagine it, could not put intent behind the ready reflex of his body.

Before Itachi could reconcile this indecision, shadows dropped out of the air in sudden movement, swift and blurred as they formed a tight ring around the party of shinobi. He recoiled back. ANBU masks shone in the wan morning light: a fox, a boar, a cat—Itachi guessed at the identities beneath. Their eyeholes were the only hint of humanity, but it wasn’t enough to tell him who was who, and he held no authority over them. He was forced to watch as the ANBU struck down the armed men and women on the street; it was an effortless annihilation, opponents quickly disarmed and buckled to knees and stomachs, wrists immobile behind their backs. 

Only the first man evaded capture. Itachi saw him dodge, and a hidden kunai flashed in an upward arc, its silver gleam a silent forewarning. The attack was deflected by a heavy chain attached to one agent’s weapon, then two other ANBU leaped upon him in that gap of defense. A scream rent the air. The man raised hands to his throat where a gash had been torn like a second mouth, gushing into his palms. He fell, defeat in the choke of life that left his body.

Tension began to burn off the scene like hot vapor as the street outside the Hokage’s office calmed. Itachi remained standing, unmoved, unable to move in the short distance from the man’s dead form on the ground.

It was then his father appeared at the entrance. The closest ANBU turned, bowing at his presence, dressed as he was in the official Hokage ensemble, face cast in shadow of the wide-brimmed hat. “Itachi,” he said. “The situation is handled here. Go inside.”

Fugaku’s voice held an edge, unknown meaning to the hard look of eyes as his eldest son lowered his head, deferential, and went into the building. Itachi didn’t pause on his path to the topmost level. His father followed at his back, an oppressive presence leading to the doors of the Hokage’s office. They went in together. His father closed the door, then crossed the room to the Hokage’s desk, sinking behind its crowded surface. 

“Discontent is growing in the population even now,” Fugaku said to him. “We anticipated this, of course. It’s not an unusual occurrence following a power change. Still, we’ll need to be prepared. I’d like to have a formal meeting with the council this afternoon to discuss the status of the village, and I want you to be there.”

Itachi looked up. 

“I recognize you are of the ANBU foremost, not the council or official government, but your presence has an effect on people. Itachi, you’re an image of strength to the Uchiha clan. So that is all this will be.”

“An appearance,” he murmured, almost lost to the quiet of the room.

“Yes. I will also have your schedule adjusted to accommodate newer duties as my personal bodyguard. I won’t require your attendance at all times, but it’s important for Konoha to see us united. We must regularly be seen together.”

His gaze hung down, fastening onto the glossy floorboards. He could feel a tide of resistance in his own mind—a desire to say no, to reject this command, even knowing it was an impossible urge. This fate wasn’t one he could deny. If anything, it was foolish to expect reality to change in the wake of what he had chosen to do. In murdering Konoha’s previous leaders, he had cleared the way for his father to take this position at the head, and he put himself in subservience to that elected leadership. 

This was his own doing.

“You’re in a special position, Itachi,” his father said. “Not only are you a member of an elite force, you are also my son. Everyone is aware of this.” He shuffled paperwork on his desk, seeming to move on from the conversation regardless of any verbal agreement, because agreement wasn’t optional. “We may face more opposition as this continues. The village is adjusting, but it will be all right.”

Fugaku said it like a promise, like something writ into the foundation of Konoha’s past and future. Itachi noticed his jaw had tightened; he felt a tug of pain in the joint. Nothing truly had changed. Throats were slit in the street, children cowered and ran, and here his father sat on that tower of authority, trading one bleak world for another. He wanted to break beneath the weight of this realization, but he couldn’t afford even that. There was no showing weakness in this place and in front of this man. It was as much as he deserved.

He was walking in the darkness, just as Danzou wished.

“One more thing.” His father leaned forward, chin placed over folded hands. “I wanted to discuss something with you about Sasuke.”

“Yes?” Itachi raised his head.

“You need to be careful how you treat him. You aren’t doing your brother any favors by babying him as you are. I know he’s young now. But he will need to grow up to be a strong shinobi as well, and he looks to you for guidance.”

“You’re concerned for his habit of sleeping in my room at night.” He kept his voice toneless and plain. It bothered him that his father wouldn’t say this.

Fugaku hesitated, then frowned. “It isn’t good for him. He can’t continue with such behavior forever.”

Not good for Sasuke, or not good for their father’s expectations of his sons—of the family and clan? Itachi’s mouth flattened, and he kept his expression carefully neutral.

“I see. I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Very good. Then you’re dismissed, and I expect you here this afternoon for the council meeting.”

—

By the time Itachi started home, the day had gone down to dusk, sunlight fading across the sky in banners of cold cerulean blue. A distinct chill heralded early night’s descent over the village, shopfronts shuttered and crowds thinning in the return to lit rooms and warm beds.

Itachi followed the wide ribbon of the Naka River. It was a route that avoided the busier avenues and allowed solitude, even if it did take longer. He had traveled it countless times in the past with Shisui at his side; they would walk shoulder to shoulder, as through the years their conversations became tenser and sparser, exchanges burdened by their heritage.

The path forked ahead, diverging in two directions: one sloped northeast and led back to the village while the other pointed north, climbing elevation until it terminated in a cliff overhang. The place where Shisui had died. Where he had been asked, _put out your hands_ , and slaughtered part of himself still alive. This was as far as he went, most days, like the stake of a flag in his mind never to forget, to always remember what had happened there. 

Worse was knowing it hadn’t even mattered.

Itachi turned and went northeast toward the village. Perhaps it wasn’t too late that Sasuke would be finished with his school work, and he could help.

A _wrongness_ came over Itachi when he stepped through the entryway of their home. Silence hung its heavy curtain, but the lights were on, illuminating the hall in a yellow wash of color. He didn’t hear his mother or Sasuke’s voices, yet their shoes were neatly tucked by the door. There came no fragrant scent of rice or cabbage preluding dinner, typically prepared by this time of day. Stranger was the fact Sasuke hadn’t greeted him when he came in. 

All of these signals rang out, and in the next instant sharingan’s veil swept over his sight. 

Chakra signatures fluttered like candles across the house. There were four: his mother’s and Sasuke’s, and two others, unfamiliar to him. Itachi moved before his mind finished processing any identity beyond _shinobi_.

His feet were quick and silent around the first corner, the second, across the living room—until he had arrived in the corridor adjacent to their personal rooms. One of these doors opened into a root cellar and dry food storage space. It was here the chakra assembled; Itachi turned, axis of his sight cutting straight through the wall, and the inexplicable scene unfolded.

His mother’s form lay crumpled on the floor. His younger brother bent over her, tiny and insubstantial. Two men stood above them both.

Itachi didn’t hesitate. He was outside the room and over the threshold with swift and lethal grace. A kunai sung in the air and embedded itself in one of the assailant’s backs. The man screamed, buckling, hands scrabbling behind himself to dislodge the blade. The other shinobi whirled around.

“You— Uchiha _scum_!”

It was a cramped space with little room for proper combat maneuvering, yet Itachi slid himself between the assailant and his family in one lunge. It was not even a contest of ability. When the uninjured man moved forward, a second kunai drove itself deep into an unguarded breastbone. Red bloomed as Itachi twisted his wrist sideways to puncture porous lungs. When he withdrew, the man collapsed in a wet hacking fit, gory splatters soiling the floorboards as his breath began to fail.

Stepping across, Itachi seized the first shinobi by the back of the head—still struggling with the kunai in his back—and calmly cut his throat. The entire floor was drenched in this bright red color: his hands and his face were smeared and slick, kunai’s handle slippery as he dislodged it from the hot corpse. The other one was not far to follow; his chokes had reduced to garbling, airless nonsense, past the grasp of reality.

Itachi met his younger brother’s glassy black eyes with the crimson of his own, and he watched Sasuke flinch away from it, hands pulling at their mother’s shoulders. 

“Mom… it’s mom… Itachi, she’s…”

He didn’t need a closer look to see she was dead. Itachi went instead to his brother, kneeling, taking him into his arms—there came a brief struggle before the smaller boy went obediently limp as he was lifted.

Supporting this meager weight in a white-knuckled grasp, Itachi exited the room and walked down the corridor to open a window. He caught his own reflection in the glass: Sasuke’s body tucked into the hold of a person who he did not recognize at first as himself. His expression was half-animal, streaks of blood like fingerpaint on gaunt white cheeks, eyes a matching shade, violence in that dead demeanor.

A creature not to be trusted.

One-handed, Itachi opened a window and sent a sleek crow swooping through and into the discolored sky. When this was done, he walked the distance to their bedrooms and slid back the panelled door to his brother’s room, carrying Sasuke inside and seating him on the mattress.

“Stay here.”

This broke Sasuke momentarily out of a daze. He shook his head, stubborn, but then sunk down into the sheets without further protest. Itachi examined his younger brother. Once he was satisfied there were no injuries previously missed, he left Sasuke to search through the house. Part of his attention remained fixed on that room and his brother within it, but Sasuke didn’t move again.

Itachi found the traps and seals on the property, scorch marks where each was individually triggered and dismantled. It seemed impossible for two shinobi to accomplish alone. To obtain information on Fugaku’s and his own whereabouts that afternoon—the two most capable of this household—and to be able to trespass without suspicion, without alarm. Even as Itachi considered ANBU, they hadn’t fought like it. And they had failed by miscalculating Itachi’s return.

His mind raced. This was an event too titanic to consider without more evidence; he should have questioned the men. If Sasuke had fallen victim…

It rose panicky in his mind, difficult to temper, almost a shock in its fearful flutter. He recalled only a tide of awful bloodlust when he first stepped foot inside that room.

Uprooting himself from the direction of that thought, Itachi went to his mother’s body and draped it in a sheet, willing eyes to burn the sight of beaten and mottled flesh into permanent memory. He lifted her off the ground as he had Sasuke. Her skin still held warmth through the thin fabric. Her weight was inconsiderable and slight as he walked the stone footpath where it wrapped to join the street.

It was here he awaited his father’s arrival.

The moment was a contained eternity as the world around him bruised to dark, night’s immutable stillness overtaking everything, such that even the wind dared not breathe. When at last his father appeared at the edge of the property, Itachi sensed the chasm beneath his feet. It yawned wide and threatened to swallow him down into a slick, black, slippery freefall—for what this meant, for what this would do to the future. A heaviness seized his throat and barricaded his voice.

He simply waited.

Flanking Fugaku were two men identifiable as Yashiro and Tekka. Both rushed forward and ahead, voices raised.

“What the hell is going on? Get a medic!” Yashiro shouted.

“No,” Itachi said. “It’s too late.”

The crow pinwheeled suddenly out of the sky like fate’s winged servant, and as he handed the body over, Itachi vanished it with a quick seal. His eyes slid to his father.

There was little to describe the expression that took over the man’s face, as Fugaku saw and recognized the stringy curtain of hair hanging out one end of the twisted sheet. A shadow struck severe features. It suggested an untouchable place that Itachi knew would not be accessed through words. It seemed as if death itself had dragged one rotten fingernail across the place his father stood, and there left a permanent mark, glaring raw and unhealing. 

This impression never truly left.

—

Time passed: Itachi thought it could have been a day and a half by the measurement of light chasing shade and shade chasing light over the veranda, but he wasn’t certain, and he hadn’t checked the clock. His body’s internal sense of time was skewed by a period of missed sleep.

If his father cried, it was not in front of his sons. The house was haunted by the dark of mourning, although Itachi could not say whether he himself mourned, because he wasn’t sure how it was meant to look. Perhaps Sasuke played an example over both Itachi and Fugaku. He had retreated to his own room and not come out since. If this was mourning—to be alone, segregated from the rest of the world at large—then Itachi had desired it since he was four years old.

It wasn’t a privilege granted now, so instead he stood across from his father in the kitchen. 

“How was she killed?” Fugaku asked.

“Blunt trauma,” Itachi said. “She was severely beaten before I arrived. I was able to take care of the assailants in time to protect Sasuke. I’m not certain whether they would have done the same to him had I not intervened.”

“Sasuke was there with her then, while it was occurring. To think he did nothing.”

Itachi noticed a hot, physiological response within himself, some unnameable flare of emotion. “He’s still an Academy student.”

“You would have protected her,” his father said in a quaking whisper, glaring at—and through—his oldest son. “At his age, you could have killed those men before they put even a hand on Mikoto.”

“Sasuke has not yet been exposed to combat. He doesn’t have the experience. That isn’t his fault.”

“It doesn’t matter,” his father said. “At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter. My wife is dead.”

Itachi said nothing. His vision angled away, and he found himself focused on the face of the clock without reading its symbols.

“This wasn’t strictly the work of those two men. Impossible. I think we both can see that. The scene in the street was a distraction so our attention was elsewhere, so we would waste our time. We need to determine how this happened,” Fugaku said to him. “I’m going to ask you to investigate this situation. Take your team along with you.”

“You’re opening a case? Is that not the responsibility of—”

“I don’t care whose responsibility it is or isn’t,” he sliced over Itachi’s words mid-sentence. “I want you on this. No one else. This is our family, and our failure, so I won’t hand it off to anyone else yet, not when you are more than capable as a captain of the ANBU. I know you won’t let me down.”

An enormity of dread threatened to press down over Itachi’s shoulders and crush him through the floor wherever he might land, but he found staring at the clock a bearable remedy. When he blinked, he noticed it was four o’clock in the afternoon.

“I accept.”

He had no other choice. It wasn’t an acceptance that mattered as anything but destitute acknowledgment of an order from his direct superior. 

When Itachi moved into the hall, he was not shocked to see his younger brother at the other end of it, peering around the corner. “Sasuke,” he said. “Are you hungry?”

Sasuke’s head ducked from view without reply. Itachi looked on into that yawning space, vacated to nothing but shadow and dust. He heard the clack of wood to his brother’s bedroom door. He wished to follow, to pursue a conversation neither of them wished to have, but he remained statuesque in that spot. Minutes crawled slow and agonizing. 

It took Itachi a moment to register that in the gloom of the hall his younger brother’s eyes had been vibrant red.

—

Inevitably, Sasuke never returned to his room. Empty nights dragged through the full cycle of the month’s moon before Itachi accepted this reality, understanding it as the necessary outcome. It was fine. Fugaku wished it. Sasuke needed independence as he aged out of childhood, and soon he would no longer require the crutch of his older brother’s presence. Awakening the sharingan was a cross over the boundary of adulthood. To feel the root of power in the eyes was growth toward future power through their heirloom, their bloodline.

Itachi had placed footsteps in the sand where he went, and Sasuke had doggedly followed at his heels. He couldn’t say why this caused acute misery, only that it was there, lurking in another hidden corner of his mind. Perhaps it would have been better if Sasuke never accessed those eyes at all.

Their mother’s funeral came and went: no special footnote, no extraordinary event, nothing but a plain ceremony one bitter winter morning under a slate sky. It was attended by a vast majority of the clan, all posed like grey wraiths on the hill languishing until the day ended. Fugaku stood in the foreground, features a blank severity dressed in customary black, and he administered the cremation with katon, its coruscated light burning moisture out of the dewy air. Soon it was done, and all that was left were ashes, collected to keep.

On this night, Itachi was seated at the low table in the dining room, legs folded on a floor cushion. A spread of dishes took most of his view: sukiyaki—pot of noodles and cabbage and thinly sliced meat, scents mingling into a pleasant aroma. Yet he did not reach to serve himself. He had no appetite.

“Itachi, won’t you eat? Izumi went out of her way to cook for us, you should acknowledge her effort.” 

It was his father who addressed him. Itachi lifted his head, looking left to where Izumi knelt meekly picking at her own bowl. “That’s really all right, Hokage-sama, we can store it for later…”

“Please, just Fugaku is fine.”

“I couldn’t…”

“I insist.”

In the past month, Izumi Uchiha had become a regular fixture of occasional evening mealtimes, awkwardly fitted into their mother’s spot at the table—a fact that did not escape Itachi’s attention. Nor had Izumi precisely consented to it. Fugaku’s mere role as Fifth, and previously clan head, had pressured compliance. Itachi wondered if she even wanted to be here or whether she was too polite and too powerless to decline. 

“Sasuke, you too. Eat something.”

His younger brother moved mechanically to obey, bowed over a steaming bowl, noisy eating habits replaced by quiet docility. The authority Fugaku held in this room was like a tight knot wringing blood out of circulation.

After the meal was finished, Sasuke disappeared into his bedroom and their father retired to his study, leaving him to help Izumi clean up.

“Itachi, it’s been a little while. How are you?” Her voice gentled, and when he looked, she gave a slight smile. “I don’t see you very much anymore.”

“I apologize. Missions and patrol take most of my time,” he said, knowing it was an excuse. “I don’t mean to avoid anyone.”

“Oh, I didn’t think that, well, what with…” She trailed off. “That was unfair. I know things are difficult right now, but I just wanted you to know that I’m here if you ever need someone to talk to. We haven’t stopped being friends, right?”

Itachi looked at her, uncertain of what to say. He managed a careful reply: “Right.”

“So there it is.” Izumi’s smile bloomed a little wider. “I’m glad.”

The entire conversation felt pantomimed, his gestures and words cobbled into a puppet of who he was supposed to be, what he was supposed to say, what he was expected to do. He could not decide whether any of it was true or genuine—he had spent so long mired in the world of shinobi that these nuances of human nature and interpersonal behavior eroded beneath his hands when he grasped for them. 

Was this feeling normal? Perhaps normalcy was no longer a concept accessible to the likes of him.

Itachi walked her to the door— _“Have a good night, Itachi.”_ —then stood back as it rattled shut, pausing at the patter of feet in the hall. Sasuke appeared around a corner, his childish face rounded in the angle of lamp light, skin pallid and eyes sleepless. “Is she going to keep coming over?”

“Sasuke,” he said softly. “Does that bother you?”

“What about you?”

“It’s what father wants.”

His younger brother’s mouth twisted, hands forming tiny fists. “I can cook too. I know how.”

“Would you like to cook with Izumi? She might appreciate—”

“No,” Sasuke said. “I don’t want to.”

Then he whipped around and vanished back down the hall, just like that, door snapping loudly shut.

—

In the hidden room beneath Naka Shrine, the Uchiha clan congregated as though it had never considered ceasing after the success of the coup, and the Fifth gravely addressed his brethren from the front: “I would like to turn our attention to an important development in the ongoing investigation of my wife’s murder. This is an urgent matter, and one that I fear will be sensitive to any delay. So let’s begin.”

Fugaku took a step back and gestured to his oldest son. Itachi moved forward, fox mask affixed, its eyeholes rounded. Sharingan gleamed bloodily within. 

( _“Keep it activated tonight.”_

_“Why?”_

_“Just do as I say, Itachi. Consider it stamina practice. I know you sometimes struggle with that.”_ )

In real time, Fugaku spoke, “My son has identified three individuals responsible for the recent violence we’ve witnessed in retaliation of the clan’s rise to power. These men allied themselves with the late Third. We have evidence they were involved in the protest outside the Hokage’s offices as well as the following attack on my own property. They used this public conflict as a distraction so that our attention would be elsewhere, while a smaller cell targeted my personal home. They obtained intelligence of my schedule, and my son’s, in order to make this happen. This was a premeditated assault.”

Silence swept the room, Itachi watching the flames of chakra flicker and flare, each individual marker distinct from the next. The entire space was alight. 

“One of these men is a member of the Sarutobi clan.”

Murmurs broke like ripples across pooled water. Itachi saw Yashiro in the front of the group, an ugly look on his face.

“Of course,” Yashiro said. “The Sarutobis have reason to hate us. Their place was already assured, and we took that back.”

“There’s certainly a motivation, though I will say they are not the only name who should cause us concern,” Fugaku warned. “That being said, I won’t stand for something like this to continue under our noses. We cannot allow ourselves to lose the progress we’ve worked so hard to obtain. If we show weakness now, it will only embolden our enemies.”

As often happened to Itachi during these meetings, his body took on a chill deeper than his own bones, and his hands tingled and ached. He repressed the cold shivering that wished to claim him and forced eyes over the gathered crowd. When a few glances attempted to meet the axis of his sharingan, they were cowed, and looked away.

“What should we do, Hokage-sama?” someone said aloud.

“A good question. And one I’m sure we’re all thinking.” He turned to face his son. “I’ll let Itachi answer it. After all, he’s going to take my place as the clan leader someday soon. I want to ensure he’s prepared for decisions like these.”

This was not as Itachi expected. His throat closed as if to siphon off the noise of protest his instinct screamed to make, even as his reflexes knew better, wiser than a child of fifteen years. “Hokage-sama,” he addressed politely. “I don’t believe this is within my authority.”

“Then you misunderstand. One day it will be and you need to be prepared for that. Besides, if I don’t agree with your judgment, I’ll just say no,” his father directed this out to the room, stirring chuckles. “Go ahead, my son.”

Minutely paralyzed, Itachi faced the clan. They watched with bated anticipation. Their attitude toward him had taken a drastic turn since the coup, and he recognized this—where once hostility brewed alongside unmet resentment, now dwelled wonder and awe. Perhaps some of that atmosphere toed the line of respect. They had no reason to think he would betray them any longer; he’d sided with the clan, so there was no going back.

Yet had anything changed? This need for control and violence and retribution was an unstemmed gash internally bleeding, and nothing he did made a difference. His hands alone could not cover the wound. 

As he stood there, Itachi was grateful for the mask on his face. Even the sharingan was a balm and barrier between himself and these people.

“The shinobi should be punished,” Itachi began carefully. “However, I would not act recklessly. It could inspire others to take their place out of a need for revenge. If the decision was mine, I would suggest imprisonment, or a period of servitude through labor.”

This split the room, some outcrying disapproval while others agreed. They were soon quelled to silence by Fugaku’s hand. “That’s enough,” he said. “While I recognize the reasonable nature of my son’s response, I want to draw attention to the particular nature of this crime.”

Itachi looked away, turning the sharingan onto the wall. He saw nothing past it underground.

“My wife is dead,” Fugaku said. “She was murdered, and so nearly was my youngest as well. I cannot easily describe to you the pain of this experience, but I know that many of you will understand what it’s like to endure the loss of your loved ones. We’ve all suffered over these years. Those we lost in the war, those we sacrificed… we did all of this so we could live in peace. Yet Konoha never recognized this. Instead, as our reward we were cut off from the village, monitored, and oppressed.”

The room became suffocating. The longer Itachi kept his eyes away through the speech, the lower his energy level sunk, as if responding to the spontaneous cold of his skin.

“My wife is dead because of who I am now and how much they fear it. How much they still hate and resent us for our superior power. Therefore, I’ve decided we will imprison two of the men,” Fugaku declared, “and execute the third—the Sarutobi. I want this done publicly.”

Here he noticed his father’s voice shaking. It was the slightest tremor, the barest fissure beneath which lived an animal of pure anger. 

Itachi wondered if it was possible to detach far enough away from one moment just to end it faster.

“And I want it done by you, Itachi.”

—

Exhaustion hounded his movements. Arriving home, Itachi crept over the floorboards but did not have the strength to mask his presence. It was vaguely fascinating to recognize his own ingrained habit, like one might observe the crawling of an insect with a torn wing. He had spent so long avoiding his family that, while he no longer required the distance put there by secrets and differences, he still fell back on it with natural ease.

If Sasuke heard him, it didn’t matter. He sensed his younger brother wouldn’t approach him now. Gone were the days when Sasuke sought him for training or guidance or companionship, and perhaps he truly was hated now in the wake of their mother’s death.

Did Sasuke view him as responsible? It was a logical assumption. How much did Sasuke understand? Certainly he could see Itachi’s part played in the clan’s reach for control. It was not impossible to guess, and Sasuke was smart: he would view Itachi as an extension of Fugaku’s will. If only he could understand the complexity, the choice, that it was this reality or they were all dead— 

No, there was always decision. And this was the one he had chosen.

Itachi collapsed onto the mattress of his bed, fatigue reigning as his mind wiped blank. Even then his awareness could not ignore the footsteps in the hall; they went down the corridor, slowed outside his door, then continued on. Once the presence of his younger brother finally faded, Itachi was able to drop into a shallow, restless slumber.

—

The shinobi knew they were being hunted, which was information Itachi deliberately leaked—a panicking animal tended to make more mistakes. And he was correct. These were not the chiseled, brutal shinobi of the ANBU: the highest ranking individual among them was Goro Sarutobi, and he was only a chunin. It was no difficult task to corner them once he unearthed their connection through interrogation of those who had been detained on the street.

When the three men fled the village and took refuge in a cave to the southeast, Itachi closed in with his team. He preferred this to capture within the walls of Konoha because it avoided the messier involvement of family members or other civilians who could be drawn into the crossfire. This was contained within the surgical precision of protocol. It was a secret violence, hidden out of sight.

Itachi did not yet dwell on how that would no longer be true at the end of the day.

Once the targets were neutralized, they were bound and hauled back, Itachi carrying the man—the Sarutobi—himself. There was no remarkable difference between him and the two shinobi who aided him in a foolish, ill-planned mutiny against the Hokage, except that he was the one who would die for it. 

All for his blood, his name, and the clan to which he belonged.

It was wrong.

A wooden platform was erected outside the Hokage’s building as word traveled, news of what would take place that evening a spark of horrified gossip throughout streets and homes, expectation of the Fifth’s iron justice as tangible and permeable as storm clouds above.

Itachi felt as though he walked through a haze preluding dusk, oblivious to his environment, locked under a miasma of thought. He wasted those hours on the veranda overlooking the garden. He noticed the grass had overgrown portions of stone pathway; no one was tending to its maintenance. That was his mother’s responsibility, and she was no longer alive to do it. 

The sun sank early, beginning touches of winter like a frigid root in the ground, turning the whole world black. 

On his way out the door, he encountered his younger brother. Sasuke hung in the threshold of the living room and watched him, expression one imperceptible furrow. Neither of them spoke. The moment lapsed.

Then, finally, Itachi said: “Stay away from father’s office tonight. Promise me, Sasuke.”

“You’re going to kill that man.”

“Promise me.”

“Why do you have to be the one to do it?”

“It’s all right,” he said. “I don’t want you to see it.”

“I’ve seen you kill before,” Sasuke said, stubborn argument in an identical pair of black eyes. 

“Sasuke,” Itachi pleaded, because he realized that was what he was doing: pleading.

_I don’t want you to see me like that._

There was no reply. He looked down at his younger brother’s small form in the entryway, like a half-feral cat with fingers hooked and digging into the door’s wooden frame, glaring, unwilling to speak. Communication broke down; Itachi could think of nothing else to say, and so he went on into the dark.

As expected, a crowd had gathered outside the Fifth’s offices, numbering close to a hundred or more. The streetlights were on and gleaming like white sentinels on the outskirts of the display. Itachi climbed the steps of the wooden platform, sword on his back. He kept his posture rigid and his presence silent. He was afforded the small mercy of the ANBU mask, intentionally gifting the ghostly impression of non-identity. It was anonymity meant to strike fear into the hearts of Konoha’s civilians, because he could be anyone, anywhere, at any time. Such was the position of shinobi who existed directly beneath the Hokage and lived subservient to his whim.

It meant less for Itachi, who would be known by all of the Uchiha present. And the majority of those who waited expectant in the eerie wintry darkness were Uchiha. 

The Fifth arrived, climbing the platform behind his son. He was clothed in the attire of his position; the hanging fabric of that hat fluttered in the bitter air.

“I appreciate all of you who chose to be in attendance this evening,” his father projected over the street. The scattered murmurs fell to nothing. “As grim as the purpose of this act may appear, it is of monumental importance.”

Itachi’s red eyes skated across the crowd, noticing when a small group of civilians broke off and walked away—as if deciding they did not, in fact, wish to be here for this. He longed to follow.

His father went on about the scruples and morals of shinobi belonging to the Leaf, but the speech faded out in his mind like rushing water, background distraction to the task ahead. His attention returned to the closing note.

“Wrongdoing must be punished. How otherwise can we expect to flourish? We cannot allow turmoil and violence to occur within our own walls, not when we are all members of the same village,” Fugaku spoke, and the same crack of anger gleamed within his words. “I hope this will serve as a reminder of what it means to go against one of your own. Now…”

Possessed by outside force of will, Itachi stepped forward, approaching the bound figure at the front of the platform. He unsheathed the blade on his back with a liquid ring of metal.

“Goro Sarutobi—for your part in acting against the Hokage, and Konoha at large—I sentence you to die.”

Where there should have been an uproar, where dissent should have risen to the surface of injustice, instead there was only a preternatural silence on the street. In the face of that, Itachi obediently raised the point of his sword. He watched the Sarutobi man through the eyes of his mask and sensed the spike of adrenaline. Chakra wavered in the air, luminescent and bright. Then he swung down and separated the man’s head from his body in one efficient slice, spraying blood across the wood of the platform. A few sharp exclamations came from the crowd. 

The man’s body collapsed forward, head rolling and eyelids flickering, then all movement ceased and he was dead. It ended.

He saw Yashiro come forward to handle the mess—that was all his mind was capable of perceiving of what now laid in front of him—and Itachi wiped his weapon off, then slid it away and moved back. His eyes skimmed over dozens of faces, unseeing.

“Good job, Itachi,” Fugaku said to him in a low voice, and returned to the crowd that had gathered in conclusion of final judgment.

Itachi did not even hear the words. It wasn’t death that stilled him to a frigid, statuesque state in the aftermath of the beheading, because he knew death. He had visited it upon countless opponents in his life by this age. The warm body on the executioner’s platform was no new sight. 

It was instead the deep well of familiar paranoia, a sense of being watched not by meaningless strangers but a known, peering presence. He thought he caught a flash of red just on the fringes of darkness: another glittering pair of sharingan in the black. Yet as soon as he had turned to look, heart a thunderous rhythm in his head, they were gone.


	2. Chapter 2

_“The exceeding brightness of this early sun_  
_Makes me conceive of how dark I have become.”_  
— Wallace Stevens, The Sun This March

PART II.

—

Summer fell across Konoha in a hot ocean of sunshine, streaming through trees to pattern the ground in vivid light. The air was soupy with humidity. Walking beneath the direct sky was a brutal punishment whose relief could only be stolen in rare shade, the village’s open streets vacant during those highest hours of the day. Itachi didn’t mind this. He preferred to travel clear of traffic. Even as the skin of his nape itched and sweated into his collared uniform, it gave him a point to narrow his attention, so he could ignore the rest of his surroundings.

He drew looks and whispers wherever he went. It was normal to expect in public on any occasion, but it was not a fact he enjoyed. It had only grown worse these last few years. Since the clan had firmly established itself—since the construction of the wall and watchtowers was finished—Konoha’s reality had solidified beneath the Fifth Hokage’s palm. 

Itachi went down the street and turned the corner, then stopped. Ahead, a man was arguing with an Uchiha guard at a food stand. 

“What do you mean, ID? Get out of my face,” the vendor spat, hand slapping the wooden side of his cart. “I got a permit.”

“I asked for your identification,” the guard said. “Not your permit. All citizens are required to carry personal identification while conducting business activities. Your stand counts as a ‘business activity’. So show me your ID.”

“You got no right—”

“I do,” the guard interrupted, blandly. “As a member of the Military Police Force, it’s my duty to ensure all civilian practices are operating in accordance with the Fifth’s regulations. Are you living under a rock, old man?”

“The Fifth my ass.” But now the vendor was wilting, shrinking behind his flimsy cart. “What are you gonna do to me if I don’t got ID?”

“Arrest you, of course, for failure to—”

“Arrest me! Heh!”

As Itachi came closer, both sets of eyes snapped onto him. It was as though they had been doused in frigid water. The guard’s posture straightened and he spoke first, tone a hitch higher. “Excuse me, Itachi-sama, I didn’t notice you approach. This is a minor issue. No cause for concern, the man just doesn’t have his ID—”

“I got a—a permit!” the vendor stumbled.

Itachi surveyed both guard and vendor. There was nothing telegraphed in his outward demeanor that revealed his inner thoughts, or the pervasive misery these interactions caused him. He only said, “I understand. Please proceed as usual.” Then he looped his path around and veered left at the next corner without looking back. 

The two men did not begin speaking again until he was several meters away, and even then their voices dropped to a cautious volume. 

Further down the road, a line had begun queueing outside Konoha’s south gate where a squadron of guards were posted at an administrative stall; directly across was a watchtower, one of seven. This one—like the other identical six—stood a severe wooden pillar topped by a domed hut, steps zig-zagging up an interior cage. Tied off the roof were two flags: one emblazoned with the leaf of Konoha, the other an Uchiha clan crest. Both draped slackly despondent in the dead summer air. 

None of the waiting civilians risked more than a glance in his direction, eyes and faces forward, many carrying packs and travel gear or pulling carts. They all intended to exit Konoha, which was an allowance granted only with the correct paperwork and reason. Some would be turned away regardless. Those desperate enough might attempt escape, but the towers served as disincentive, along with the punishments incurred for those who were unsuccessful. 

Thus far, those numbers tilted in favor of the guards sent to hunt them down. 

Not every guard surveilling the gates was Uchiha, but it was enough that it didn’t matter. Those ingratiated through other means enjoyed the benefits of loyalty—to a point. Blood would never change, and the clan was insular, yet many understood the necessity of obedience. Some even seemed to worship the Uchiha.

He kept his head turned as he passed the south gate, continuing on the route of patrol. The ropy tension in his body did not seem to ease even after the watchtower slipped behind rooftops and trees.

When at last he arrived home, evening had begun to set in, its heat an opaque film over the veranda as cicadas droned a loud and persistent ballad in the surrounding greenery. There was noise of movement inside, so he went to meet it.

Across the threshold Itachi was greeted by a familiar sight: Izumi carried plates and steaming dishes between the kitchen and dining room while Izumi’s mother sat quiet at the low table, bustle of activity and conversation a backdrop to the scents of traditionally cooked food—and it was here Fugaku came in from his study to join them.

“Good timing,” his father said to him. “Let’s have dinner.”

Itachi heard these words but did not take the suggestion to mind, standing in the entryway. Naturally his eyes went down the open corridor past the kitchen where he knew he would find Sasuke’s room. Yet he heard and sensed nothing. His body was primed for that well-known presence, drawn like a moth’s thirst for light. “Where’s Sasuke?” 

“Who knows where that stubborn boy went,” Fugaku said noncommittally.

“Is he on a mission?” 

“He isn’t supposed to be. Leave it, Itachi, and let’s go to the table.”

Ignoring this, Itachi had crossed halfway down the hall when the first sense of his brother’s presence appeared in a lick of distant flame. A few more steps brought him to Sasuke’s bedroom door. He slid it open with his fingertips.

At the same time, Sasuke’s window cracked wide, allowing in a merciful breeze.

And there was his younger brother—dressed in the beige colors of his chunin uniform and perched upon the windowsill. Their eyes collided. Sasuke’s expression was a difficult puzzle: it wrinkled across his nose and between brows, his frowning mouth pinched up. “What are you doing in my room?”

“Why are you in your uniform?” 

Sasuke leanly swung himself through the window, landing on his feet. He then bent to pull off his shoes. “Nothing. It doesn’t matter.”

The ensuing silence was a steel wall between them, and Itachi could see nothing that would melt it down.

“We’re at the table,” he finally said, turning to rejoin the others. Even despite Sasuke’s moody deflection, a mute relief flowered inside of him to know his brother was home, that he would come to eat. It was a selfish wish granted, however infrequent it came. 

Sasuke followed quietly behind him.

Over dinner, conversation was kept conservative and polite, idle commentary shared between Izumi’s mother and Fugaku on the weather ( _“It’s getting so much hotter these days.”_ ); the current state of affairs for the Uchiha clan ( _“Nothing of note, which is usually a good sign._ ”); and how both Izumi and Itachi were getting along ( _“You two have been good friends for quite a while, haven’t you?”_ )—the latter a topic lingering longer than Itachi wished it would.

To his left, Izumi stared with transparent discomfort at her lap; to his right, Sasuke picked disinterestedly at his meal.

“The more my responsibilities as Hokage have grown, the more I’ve come to rely on Itachi to maintain our clan’s position and needs within the village,” Fugaku was telling Izumi’s mother. “It is no easy task.”

“Is that right… so it won’t be long until Itachi succeeds as clan head?”

“Not long at all. I was not much older than him when I took over for my own father,” Fugaku said, leveling a look onto the son in question, “and began to build my own family. That’s certainly a day I look forward to seeing.” 

Itachi met his father’s eyes, finding in them only distance, an assessment and appraisal more than even pride—let alone warmth. It had become the shape of their relationship since the coup. Or perhaps even further back. Fugaku so often spoke of what his oldest son would do as though he was not here, as if it was assumed. Wasn’t it? Hadn’t he agreed to his father’s vision of the future when he chose their clan over the village? In moments like these, Itachi lacked strength to deny the expectation. They served as reminders of his place.

“You’ve outdone yourself with the meal yet again this week, Izumi. Thank you.”

Izumi flushed, hands flattening out the lap of her apron. “Oh, it’s nothing, Fugaku-san…”

“One day I hope you’ll be able to call me father.”

Abruptly, Sasuke stood from the table. “I’m finished.” He shoved the savagely destroyed meal on his plate away, then left the room. Fugaku’s gaze followed.

“That boy.” It was a reproachful hiss in the back of his throat. “Itachi, make sure you see our guests out properly. I should return to my study, the paperwork never seems to end. I enjoyed our time this evening.”

“Of course,” Izumi’s mother said. “We always appreciate your invitations, Fugaku-san.”

After the necessary chore of clean up and polite goodbyes at the door, Itachi found himself alone. These solitudes were a rare reprieve at the end of the day. All of it was wearying: the tedium of meetings, the bureaucracy of leadership, the slow despair of witnessing his village further shackled beneath the power of his own clan.

In the seven years since the coup, Konoha had fully recovered—so much as a dried, rotten husk could be counted as restoration, its ability to function secondary to obeying the mood of the Uchiha crowned at its head. The other clans had accepted them, simply because they had little choice if they wished to avoid their own eradication, all discipline enforced by an ever-watchful, omniscient ANBU legion alongside the Police Force of Uchiha guards. It was an impossible situation. 

Seven years, and Itachi felt himself further away from certainty this was the correct decision, yet he possessed no clear path out.

In the washroom he sank into a bath, its temperature to the near point of scalding as steam curled off in visible plumes. It turned his skin a brutal shade of pink. The heat was no mercy in summer’s season, but even that punishment did not seem a satisfying severity.

Itachi soon lost track of the passage of minutes. On the wall beside the tub there were jade tiles inset at patterned intervals, a green touch of color in the sleek wood uniformity of the room. He counted these as he meticulously cleaned his body: one, two, three horizontally; four, five, six down another row; seven, eight—

Something prickled at the corner of his awareness. Itachi looked, though there was no one there, and the washroom door was closed.

Almost.

He noticed a stripe of black up the seam of the door indicating it hadn’t sealed all the way. The impression that he wasn’t alone lingered, though he couldn’t say why. Sensing chakra signatures was an ability not possible without the sharingan’s eye of insight or other specialty and training. At the moment, his eyes were dormant black.

Only one individual had ever caused this feeling. Not chakra, but like it, a pale candle in a dark room—

Itachi rose in a shower of water and toweled off quickly, changing into loose sleepclothes, and stepped into the dim corridor. It was deserted. 

“Sasuke?”

There came no answer.

—

Naka Shrine was filled to the brim with Uchiha, its newest location at the bare heart of the village—a traditional shrine less than a mile from the Hokage’s headquarters and barred to anyone who was not Uchiha or did not receive explicit permission to cross its perimeters. They no longer crowded into that dark, secretive space: here and now they had freedom, shoji screens opened to allow the necessary flow of air.

Itachi went to the front, standing as the others filed in and took available seats on the floor. He had temporarily claimed Fugaku’s place of authority, and while he often led these gatherings, it was still his father who had final word. Of course, as the Fifth, that was expected.

How twisted it must appear to the rest of Konoha, to know their leader was here answering the requests and concerns of his own clan first and foremost, favoritism in plain sight of the street. It was something that brought Fugaku no alarm. Not as it did Itachi, who noticed a dark seed of nausea in his stomach as he stood tall and went through the usual formalities of the meeting’s start.

“Thank you for joining us this afternoon,” Itachi said mechanically. “We appreciate your attendance and understand many have taken time out of their schedules to be here. I would first like to acknowledge the work of the Police Force in the maintenance and regulation of the Fifth’s Law…”

On it went. The current captain, Yashiro, stood and bowed on behalf of his cohort. Others were named: new ANBU squad members, jonin and chunin graduates, and even several fresh genin as welcome to their first official congregation. There were some two hundred shinobi in the room. It was a vast change from the secret room beneath the original Naka Shrine. Their numbers had grown over the years, in majority part due to family members marrying in. Next year’s Academy class would see an unprecedented surge in the attendance of Uchiha children.

He finished reading off the list of names and deferred to his father, withdrawing to a corner in relief.

While most attention diverted to Fugaku at the front, Itachi still felt the oppressive weight of a pair of eyes. He surveilled the open room. There toward the back, his notice fell across Sasuke’s sightline, and their gazes latched. Sasuke’s expression held a chiseled and impassive disregard, his mouth set in one flat shape and his brow uncreased. Yet an intensity threatened to boil off the surface as his brother looked at him—direct, inescapable heat. It was an unnerving focus, and one that Itachi had never encountered in his life. He could not understand what it meant.

After an eternity pinned beneath that opaque look, his eyes dropped away. It was a feeling that scraped over his nerves. He had no choice but to surrender to it.

When the meeting concluded, Itachi went to stand by the entrance of the shrine. Uchiha streamed past him with little more than a word, although many bowed in polite and respectful deference to his presence nonetheless. He watched them go. His mind remained in that room, on his brother’s profoundly dark eyes.

It was there Sasuke appeared beside him as if summoned out of his own mind. His younger brother’s gaze had cooled from whatever he’d witnessed earlier, but still it carried a stinging sharpness. “Let’s go home.”

This was unusual. Typically Sasuke would leave unprompted before Itachi and Fugaku; their paths rarely crossed.

“I was waiting on father.”

“He knows the way. You don’t need to walk with him every time.”

It was such a dry and inexplicit statement he wondered if it was an accident, and he couldn’t prevent the barest tug at his own lips. “Perhaps.”

“So, let’s go.”

“There you are,” Fugaku interrupted behind them. “Ah, Sasuke. You too. Let’s head back together. Rare for the three of us to have a moment with one another like this, we should take advantage of the opportunity.”

Itachi saw his brother’s expression close off, line by line, until he’d retreated into the stone-faced version of himself typical of everyday life. Sasuke turned and began to descend the steps without a word. Fugaku followed, trailed last by Itachi.

“I’ve been meaning to speak with both of you,” their father began once they reached the lower street. “Sasuke, this concerns you. Pay attention when you’re being addressed.”

Sasuke’s pace slowed to bridge the gap that had opened between them, if only by a few steps. “I’m listening, father.”

“Very good. I’d like to talk about your futures. Particularly yours, Sasuke. Now that you’ve become a chunin, you should consider the next rank.”

“I already was,” Sasuke said, “but I don’t need to be a jonin to join ANBU.”

“ANBU? Is that your goal? Itachi’s already established himself as a captain within the ANBU. That won’t be necessary.”

The atmosphere over them brittled with static. He watched his younger brother fall to contemptuous quiet, profile obscured by the angle of his head. 

“The ANBU is an esteemed organization on its own,” Itachi argued, splitting that fragile silence. “I imagine Sasuke only wants—”

“That doesn’t matter. It will be my decision, because the ANBU belongs to the Hokage, and I assess the shinobi ready to join its division. Sasuke, you should focus on becoming a jonin. Ideally, I would like to see you succeed as the next captain of the Police Force. The clan would benefit having you in such a position.”

_The clan, the clan, the clan…_

Something tore, then, a fissure driven into the charged air. Trained adrenaline spiked in Itachi before he could understand its source; he felt each of his muscles constrict, battle-ready. 

His brother was looking away. “Whatever.”

“ _Sasuke_ —”

“Let him consider it,” Itachi intervened again. He could not say why he obeyed the impulse, only that there was now a desperate desire to slot himself between them. “Give Sasuke time. There is no reason to make this choice now.” 

Slowly Fugaku’s temper reined in, and he sighed. “Very well. I just want you both to understand the situation we’re in. The entire village rests on our backs. We have to consider everything ahead of us, and we must never forget where we came from or how hard we worked to achieve this together. Understand?”

“Yes,” both brothers answered.

The rest of the walk passed in a tense, tedious silence. As soon as they reached the gate of their property, Sasuke bowled ahead and disappeared through the door.

Fugaku hung back, gesturing to Itachi. “I worry about that boy. I can’t begin to guess what is going through his head.”

“It’s all right,” Itachi said, and he realized he was placating his father. “I can speak to him if necessary, though I’m not certain he’ll listen.”

“Is that so? Sasuke adores you far more than me.” Fugaku gave a thin smile. It fit unnaturally on his mouth. “I think if he hears anyone, it will be your voice over my own.”

Doubt became a looming tower in his mind, fitted at odds beside a trickling sense of satisfaction. It formed a single drop in the deep unending murk of his own thoughts. However Sasuke felt toward him he could not easily say—but he knew what he wanted. A private, hidden piece of himself longed for closeness with his younger brother as much as he understood it was undeserved in light of their history, their present, and very likely their future.

Fugaku went into the house, so Itachi followed.

—

An uneventful week passed before he was summoned to the Hokage’s office late in the afternoon. When he arrived, he was startled to find Sasuke there, rigidly posed halfway between the door and desk with his eyes on the ground. His younger brother was wearing his chunin uniform. Immediately Itachi noticed signs of combat in the smears of dirt and blood on fabric, and he felt his heart lodge into his throat.

He took a closer look, then saw with stark relief that Sasuke was fine except a stemmed nosebleed and bruised chin.

“What happened?” Itachi asked, shutting the door at his back.

A silence drew out—one whose genesis must have occurred long before he’d arrived—until at last Fugaku spoke, “I’ll let him tell you. Itachi, will you escort your brother home? He’ll have no need to continue his duties for today.”

“But the mission—”

“Is not one you will be going on. I had hoped our previous conversation would deter you from this, but I see it fell on deaf ears. Clean up your act. You know the village has its eyes on you too, Sasuke. You represent this clan when you choose to be willful and destructive. There is no justification for this behavior, and you will accept the punishment.”

Mutely, Sasuke turned on his heel. 

“I leave this to you,” Fugaku said to his oldest son, then returned to a pile of documents.

When Itachi stepped out of the office, he found his brother waiting: arms crossed, face forward, body language sealed off.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.” Sasuke led them through the building and out onto the hot street, turning in the direction of the Uchiha compound, neither daring to intrude on the veil of quiet that now plagued them. They had walked close to ten minutes when Sasuke finally said, “I fought with someone.”

“Who?”

“No one you know. They complained and I received a disciplinary warning. That’s the end of it.”

Reason enough to clarify their father’s ire. Itachi could find no sufficient words, so he continued to examine his brother’s profile—until black eyes flinched sideways and they again looked at one another, this time without the separation of a room apart. He could not easily define what he saw in his brother’s gaze. Different from the clan meeting’s consumptive intensity, now Sasuke’s look was shuttered and sullen in the way he might once have acted as a child after injuring himself and regretting the pain.

Whatever Sasuke saw in turn, it coaxed his pace to an abrupt halt. “Let’s go to the training grounds.”

“I’m supposed to be escorting you home,” Itachi said.

“I know. But let’s go there instead.”

“Are we training?”

Sasuke’s eyes fell and then jumped, an elastic snap back. “I want to spar.”

“The grounds will be busy this time of day, and there are other—”

“Itachi.” His younger brother turned and minimized some of the polite distance between them, head angled in display of the swollen red mark on his chin and residual blood above his upper lip. Itachi muted a wildly irrational impulse to wipe it clean with his sleeve, focused instead on Sasuke’s words: “Stop trying to come up with an excuse. We can go to the old grounds on the edge of the village. No one will bother us. I’m not asking you to train me, I’m asking for a sparring match. You can permit that much, can’t you?”

The guise of that explanation was far closer to demand than request. Itachi felt preparatory tension settle into his body against his will. “All right.” 

Sasuke whipped around and started off in the lead, Itachi following more slowly, until partway down the street his brother took a leap onto a nearby roof. Itachi saw him vanish out of sight over the building’s lip. Compelled to pursue, he jumped up to the roof as well, and watched as Sasuke cut diagonally across the area in an efficient shortcut. He went after him.

The boundary of the forest loomed into sight, fringe of trees thick and green in the advent of summer, and by the time Itachi landed on the ground his skin was slick with a sheen of sweat. He wasn’t out of breath; neither was Sasuke, several steps ahead and traveling further into the protective perimeter of shaded woods. 

Here they were closer to the outlying wall, hemming in the village where steep cliffs ended and forest began. If he looked to the southeast, he knew he would see the peak of one of the watchtowers, far enough away not to worry yet lingering a phantom reminder of imprisonment. 

And occasionally, even now, executions occurred for those with the most offensive crimes to their name. The executioner’s platform still haunted the street outside the Hokage’s building, though Itachi himself had not climbed its step since. His killings remained in the dark.

Itachi trailed behind, and when Sasuke stopped, they stood in a small and sparse clearing familiar to him. A stump sat at its center. There were divots and cuts in the bark of the surrounding trees, evidence suggestive of kunai and shuriken practice. 

It was a place of his childhood. Distant now, spun out behind him in past shadow. These were the grounds where he had first trained himself, where he had later trained against Shisui, where he sometimes had brought Sasuke. Certainly Sasuke remembered if this was the chosen location. Those memories seemed an entire lifetime ago: he was another person, one who had been split down the middle of a wretched decision like a block of wood beneath an axehead.

On one side of that decision, his brother faced him and said, “Taijutsu only. I already know you’ll beat me at anything else. Not that I wouldn’t still try, but I want to focus on strength.”

“What brought this on?” He was surprised, and it must have shown on his face for the way his brother’s shoulders drew in a defensive flex.

“The man I fought earlier was too weak,” Sasuke said bluntly. “It wasn’t satisfying.”

Whatever the truth, Itachi let it rest, crossing over to the tree’s stump where he began to peel off the burden of armor and weapons: belt unfastened and draped over the flat surface of wood, followed by the guards on his arms and the pouch strapped to his right thigh. Everything deposited, he took a few steps back. “I have to admit I never expected you would come to me for a brawl, Sasuke.”

His brother mirrored him, shedding weapons and the padded flak jacket of his uniform. “It’s not a brawl, it’s a spar.”

“So it is.”

As they faced each other then, there were no more words left, only the empty space between them—and how quickly it could be erased.

While Itachi had not trained with Sasuke in many years, he wasn’t oblivious to his progress as a shinobi, so there was little shock in the speed with which a fist sailed at his face. Itachi deflected with his forearm and felt the power of the strike drag brusing at skin, whistling past his left ear. A second fist swung in from the right. This he deftly sidestepped.

Another lunge, another pair of fists followed through with the kick of one knee, then Sasuke dropped his weight onto both hands and pivoted his other leg in a sweeping arc—Itachi dodged the onslaught and fell back to pillow their proximity.

Tension socketed an electric current in the air, crackling as they went through the dance again: missed hits, knees and feet that never reached their slippery target as Itachi manuevered to safety each time.

“That’s all you’re going to do?” his brother called, a smirk fastened to his mouth as he crouched, panting. “Run away?”

“It’s no failure on my part if you can’t succeed in landing a blow.”

That look turned jagged, tilting off Sasuke’s face as he dove in for another collision, kicking up dust in the hunger of pursuit. A leg hooked at his middle and Itachi dropped under it, then a fist hammered over the crown of his skull, forcing him into a backflip to escape. Sasuke gave him no room to breathe this time. The assault was as unrelenting as the brutal daylight through the trees, his body becoming one hot line like a blade left too long in the sun. Sweat painted the back of his neck. Humidity worsened it, every inhale as if through wet wool while lungs worked for air to oxygenate blood. 

Persistent fists, powerful legs, those impossibly black eyes.

Until Sasuke had crowded him to an inescapable point, and Itachi lashed out, snatching wrists and twisting arms. He pinned his younger brother in front of him. Sasuke’s movement was restricted, Itachi’s hands like iron bands that would not let him pull loose. When Sasuke desperately drove a foot backward, Itachi kicked his legs, forcing knees to buckle and hauling his weight up with the shudder of momentum.

He held Sasuke against the flat front of his body and waited for him to cease struggling. He could feel Sasuke’s forearms pulling in taut lines of wiry muscle, but he did not relent in the grip.

Then Sasuke’s head dropped back on his shoulder, ribcage expanding on each heave, and their eyes were _close_ , millimeters apart, wherein the slightest shift would touch his chin to his brother’s hot, flushed cheek. And Sasuke went completely slack against his chest on a breathless exhalation.

Something was wrong in that reaction.

Instinctively Itachi pushed, forcing Sasuke to the dirt, wrists trapped by one hand—a knee planted between his brother’s shoulders in finality. “Yield.”

Sasuke was still panting. He didn’t raise his head.

“Yield, Sasuke.”

“You want to know why I attacked him?” his brother’s voice came on a gravelly rasp, chin digging into the ground as black eyes angled so they looked at one another. “You want to know what he said that pissed me off so badly I almost put him through a wall?”

He abruptly released Sasuke and moved away. “That’s enough.” 

“He was talking about you,” Sasuke said, spitting the words, “calling you a monster, the Fifth’s bloodthirsty lap dog, like all you do is—”

“ _Sasuke_.”

“It’s wrong. They don’t know you, but they say those things like they do and I’m supposed to ignore them? I’m sick of it. I’m sick of acting like I don’t care, like I’m fine with what’s going on. I’m not stupid. That’s not you.”

The moment dropped off, falling into some unreachable place as utter quiet reclaimed it. He found himself looking down at his brother. Words became unfathomable. Turning, Itachi crossed to the tree stump and began meticulously to redress.

“Say something, Itachi.”

Weapons strapped into place, guards pulled over his forearms, Itachi did not turn around. He could feel the sweat evaporating on his skin, cooling it, although he didn’t yet feel its relief. 

“Don’t walk away like that,” his brother sounded furious and plaintive at once, twin miseries intertwined. “Like you used to.”

Itachi went still. He gaze drifted toward the treeline in contemplation of their surroundings, and his mind grappled with how to proceed. Self-preservation sang high; it was forever an instinct that required concentration to tame. When he finally did speak, he was glad to find his tone a measured channel of composure—not the shredded unease lurking somewhere deeper.

“You shouldn’t concern yourself with the perceptions of others. Nor should you believe anything blindly without taking into account all possible points of view. This will only limit you,” he said, in a voice softened like the breath at the end of a sigh. “It’s never as clear as it seems on the outside.”

“Stop it,” Sasuke hissed, retaliatory. “Don’t act like you agree with them.”

He allowed himself to look back, and he found his younger brother on hands and knees in the grass, expression a black curtain of complicated emotion. It was obscure to him, and painful to confront for longer than those few seconds. “Let’s go home, Sasuke.”

And moving, slowly, Itachi led the way from the clearing.

They did not speak again for the duration of the return. The only signal he had that Sasuke trailed after him was the weight of his gaze branded on his spine. The rife atmosphere between them was distracting to a point where Itachi couldn’t accurately recall the path he navigated back home. Streets and landmarks passed, unremarkably insignificant. He took no shortcuts.

When they reached the stone pathway that led to the entrance, Itachi stopped and looked up. Izumi was on the veranda holding a bundle of items, and she smiled warmly at their approach.

“Itachi, Sasuke! I was hoping you might be around.”

“Izumi,” he said, taking the steps to join her on the raised walkway. “What is it?”

“I just wanted to drop a few things off. Extra ingredients. We had too much in the garden.” She presented the burden in her arms: fresh vegetables tucked in brown paper, gleaming ripe and cleanly damp. “I even brought tomatoes for—”

His younger brother climbed the steps beside them and went in, wordless, without indication he had seen or heard their guest. 

“Sasuke?” she asked as the door clacked shut, concern in her tone. “Is he okay? He seems… Did you two fight?”

“Not seriously. It’s all right, let’s go around to the kitchen.”

Itachi accepted the vegetables, then took the walkway to the side of the property, entering through one of the other doors here. The house was humid and dim inside. He left an inner shoji screen open for air flow through the corridor. His skin itched, longing for a bath to scrub off all the grime and sweat of the day. 

“Ah, I brought you something else, Itachi.”

He glanced up from the task of sorting vegetables to spot a folded box in her hands, its plain white exterior immediately recognizable. “That’s kind of you, but it’s unnecessary—”

“A little snack before dinner, right? I won’t tell if you don’t.”

Minutes later, they sat on the veranda and shared the sweet dumplings between one another, bare feet hanging over the low ledge as they observed the fading afternoon. Daylight burnt gold across the surface of the koi pond, fish scales jeweled and glittering in the refraction of light as their sleek bodies swam lazily beneath. The shishi-odoshi in the garden clacked its rhythmic, calming tempo. Itachi held a thin wooden skewer, bare of dumplings, and pressed it against the fingertip of his opposite hand, watching white skin dimple and flush at the point of pressure.

“I don’t think I’d mind it, you know.” Izumi broke the silence after some time, looking up to consider the shaded eaves of the house. “Marrying you.”

His throat closed and his mind wiped, unable to reply. It was fine, because Izumi didn’t seem to be waiting for him to speak.

“What I mean is that it wouldn’t be such a bad thing, even though we don’t love each other that way. I’ve always considered you a friend. But I do feel like I can trust you if something were to happen.” Izumi’s head rolled on her shoulder, silky hair slipping to cover part of her cheek. “You’ve always been kind to me. Maybe it’s because we’ve known each other so long, but…”

“Why?” he said, and she glanced over. “Why would you be fine with that?”

“Well, I have to get married eventually.” Izumi smiled brightly, like this was obvious, but he saw that it strained her lips and eyes. “That’s just how it is.”

“Isn’t there someone else, then?”

“Maybe.” She said it in a vague way, eyes glancing out toward the pond again. “Maybe not. It doesn’t matter. You’re the Hokage’s son, after all. Our parents are pretty set on it.”

“You’re already a jonin.”

“I used to think that way too,” Izumi said, “that all I had to do was get really strong and become a respectable shinobi, so I could do anything, and go anywhere, and be whoever I wanted. Except… mother is all alone without me. I can’t abandon her, not after… You know. And with how things have been lately—”

“I understand,” he said. “I don’t think I would mind it either.”

“Now I know you’re just saying that. What about you? There has to be someone else, I don’t think there’s a single Uchiha more desirable than you right now.” Her face flushed, and she backpedaled, “I mean, because of your position in the clan and your age, all of the eligible women are just waiting to snatch you up.”

Itachi didn’t notice this stumble. “There isn’t anyone.” It was a rare gleam of straightforward honesty and it felt strange to admit, as though he should have lied, but this personal realm was no hidden secret. He had never seen it as a priority. 

“Hmm. I think it’s because you’re not letting yourself consider it seriously.” As usual, Izumi managed to leap past the sparse words he’d chosen. “You’re always in your own head looking straight through everyone else, and you’re probably missing all the signs.” She reached over and rapped knuckles gently against his temple. “Pay attention, maybe that person is right under your nose.”

He leaned away, but there was a playfulness to the gesture that touched a lukewarm smile to his lips. “I suppose,” he said, rolling the skewer between his fingers. “As you said, it wouldn’t matter.”

“Maybe not for me.” Izumi withdrew both hands to her lap. “You could do anything you wanted if you tried. At least I think so.”

He could think of nothing else to say. His entire mind twisted into disagreement— _you’re wrong_ —but it was not an opinion he could put voice behind, not without inviting possible argument. The roots of his life were inextricably coiled around the village, around the clan, and most importantly around his father. Rather than granting freedom from a hellish reality, he had instead only dug the trench of an inevitable grave. It was not one he could pull someone else into, not by choice.

And this was a fate he was prepared to accept so long as it did not come at the cost of what truly mattered. 

“I should be going,” Izumi said. She stood on the veranda and he walked her around the house until he could see her off at the main path. “Bye, Itachi. See you later.” 

He watched Izumi’s figure vanish through the gate. Shadows closed in behind her, and the cicadas began a chirruping concert all around the garden, the bloom of hydrangeas a fragrant assault on his return to the house.

The door clicked shut at his back. Itachi leaned momentarily against it and forced his mind into silence. He would prepare a meal for both his father and brother and leave it in the kitchen, bathe, then resign himself to the exhausted and dreamless sleep that so often claimed him these nights. 

When he opened his eyes and walked forward, he found Sasuke waiting in the unlit hall. Fresh from a bath, his brother’s hair clung to his skin like wet ink, and Itachi saw he’d changed from his uniform into looser clothing. 

“She isn’t staying?” his brother asked. The question strung itself like a wire between them, singing taut. “What did she want?”

Itachi looked down the corridor and wondered whether he should take another path to the kitchen. “No, she left some ingredients for us. I was going to prepare something.”

“I can do that. You should clean up and get some rest.”

“I don’t mind,” he protested.

“Itachi.” In a telling tone, his brother leveled immutable dark eyes onto him. He couldn’t refuse it.

Then the front door opened again, and their father arrived home. Itachi noticed Sasuke flinch into straightness, shoulders locked as his gaze dropped reactively downcast—it wasn’t a response that made immediate sense. When Fugaku came around the corner and encountered both of them in the hall, Sasuke’s posture had solidified into one of residuous indifference.

Itachi’s attention lifted from his brother to what he saw on his father’s face: a bleak and serious furrow committed to memory for how often it showed in difficult situations. While it was not patently emotional, it was a near cousin, a greasy anger prevalent in the man most of the time now.

Fugaku was simple to observe and intuit; Sasuke, far less so.

The moment splintered over rocks as his father acknowledged them both, and said to Itachi: “Meet me in my study.” Then he went down the corridor.

Itachi looked at Sasuke, but Sasuke was already turning away, slipping around the corner out of reach. So he followed his father.

The room never seemed to change. Each time he visited it, the walls were blank and tatami mats bare, main fixtures of furniture taken by the squat, low desk at the center of the floor and the tall wooden shelves just behind it. 

He crossed to the desk and sank down, legs folding. Fugaku was already seated and facing the window. A bottle of sake had been opened and set on the table’s glossy surface. Unusual; he rarely saw his father drink. 

“We have another situation,” Fugaku said. “I’m afraid I must ask for your assistance again, my son.”

It was so strangely phrased Itachi could not fold his mind around it, not at first. _Ask_ : as though this man wasn’t his father, wasn’t the Hokage of the village, could not simply name his demand. He had proven years ago that Itachi’s will stood at the mercy of familial duty and obligation to Konoha. Yet here within these translucent seconds, Fugaku disregarded that. 

Was it an attempt to twist the reality of the fact Itachi couldn’t refuse? If he agreed, would the idea seed itself in his head that this was the autonomy of freedom? The illusion of choice and free will?

In his silence, Fugaku continued. “We’ve gotten word of a skirmish on Takigakure’s land to the north. It could be nothing, but based on the report…”

Itachi reeled. Takigakure rested a near neighbor to Kusagakure—and more importantly, Iwagakure. Still he did not speak. It felt as though he’d swallowed a dry stone, sealing off the passage of his voice. 

“Our village has been stable these last several years due to its concentrated focus on its own people, as you’re aware. The clan has made sure of this. By closing our walls and monitoring the surrounding territory, we’ve prevented enemy shinobi from crossing into the village and gathering intelligence. We’ve stayed strong; Konoha has accepted us.” Fugaku paused here, and his expression sobered. “However, I recently sent two cells out to the country’s border for a routine survey. One of these cells was completely wiped out. The other was decimated as well, but they had a survivor. This individual is claiming to have encountered shinobi belonging to Iwa.”

The stone sank into his stomach on an excruciating swallow. 

“Iwa,” Itachi said. “Are they certain?”

“No, but even if they were, I can’t trust a single eyewitness report. Not on something of this gravity. That’s why I need to put your team on this, Itachi, as reluctant as I am to do it. This is meant to be a reconnaissance mission. I don’t want you engaging the enemy if you don’t have to.”

It was such a straightforward and reasonable approach he did not know how to reply through the mounting sickness of his own dread. “I understand,” he said in absence of substantive argument. It was then he noticed the itching of a familiar presence near the door, a flame’s little tongue, lapping just in his peripheral.

One person, always. No one else he could sense without sharingan. Itachi didn’t look over his shoulder, but his skin broke with gooseflesh.

“Then you leave tomorrow. I’ll give you the report to review tonight. I expect this will take a few days, but don’t push yourself, and stop overnight as necessary—”

The door of his father’s study rattled open. 

“Let me go with him,” Sasuke demanded as he stepped in. “I can help.”

At this interruption, Fugaku’s head lifted. His eyes assessed his youngest son in a remote way. “Absolutely not.”

“Why? There’s no need to fight if it’s a reconnaissance mission, and the experience—”

“I said no, Sasuke,” came in tones of steel. “Does that word mean little to you? Did you forget you were being punished? I haven’t forgotten, nor can I look past your disobedience in listening to a conversation that was not meant to include you.”

Fugaku touched the sake bottle’s lip to the ochoko on the desk and poured out a precise amount of clear fluid. When he drank it, his throat barely worked through the mouthful.

Sasuke did not move from his position near the door. He stood close to Itachi’s right side, within reach of a hand if chosen. Itachi only looked: his brother’s demeanor was the ominous grey of a storm front, fingers fisted and shoulders rounded, physical language communicating aggression. It stewed in the room and Itachi felt prisoner to its influence.

Abruptly he got to his feet. “Excuse us, father.” And he reached for Sasuke’s wrist, cool fingers looping over thin bones—Sasuke flinched, yanked loose, and whipped out of the room.

Fugaku served himself another glass. “Itachi, stay and have some.” He indicated the second ochoko. 

Itachi stared into the void left by his brother’s exit and felt within himself an intense surge of longing, desiring nothing more than to pursue as he had before, when he had followed Sasuke to the training grounds. He felt pressed to the desperate brink of abandonment and isolated further in the recognition that this was for the best. He didn’t move. 

_Stay_ : his father’s demand. _Go_ : his mind’s begging want. And the rift between the two was so enormous that he was stunned to inaction. He heard the trickle of sake filling another cup; he heard the outside chorus of cicadas and creaking breeze; he chased the sense of his brother down the hall, around the corner, into the solitude of a closed-off bedroom as far away as another world. Then he sank back down onto his knees and laid his hands in his lap.

—

The forest was a liminal area past the northern gate of the village, afternoon light washing out its shadowed boundary like cobweb so that Itachi could see a good distance past the fringe of trees. He watched branches shiver in a tepid gust of wind.

Aiko—the team’s second in command and a taijutsu specialist—appeared beside him. She slanted a look at her captain; her eyes were colored pale ash through the holes of her owl mask. “It’ll rain soon. If we move quickly we should escape the worst of a storm, unless you want us kicking through the mud on top of the heat we’re already dealing with.” 

“I don’t disagree,” he said, ignoring the contempt that slid into her tone. “Then we should reach the town outlying Fire Country by nightfall. We’ll be within a day of our objective.”

“So what are you waiting on?”

He said nothing. His dark eyes swept over the forest, again, a sense of something off in his awareness. Konoha’s walls and cliffs towered at their backs. Nothing seemed to move except the tepid breeze feathering their overwarm skin.

Masashi, their other squadmate, made a low humming sound from a few meters away. He was a small and mousy man who wore a boar-shaped mask over blunt, irreverent features. “Losing daylight, Itachi-sama.”

Itachi closed his eyes. “Let’s go.”

They ran, cutting a path northbound through the brush, and when Itachi leapt up to the nearest branch of a tree for both vantage and better direction, his squadmates followed obediently. An hour at this brutal pace passed; Itachi eventually began to slow, then halted altogether, perched high in a tall oak. Aiko landed on the same branch beside him, while Masashi dropped down one lower to scan the mossy forest floor. 

“What is it this time?” Aiko asked. With her face obscured he could only guess at the expression underneath, but her voice came out breathless. “If you keep stopping us, we’ll never—”

“There’s someone here,” Masashi said from below. “Itachi-sama’s noticed.”

The tomoe in his eyes wheeled, surroundings cast in the bloody light of the sharingan. There it was. A chakra signature flared on their tail and torched a path ahead.

“You two wait here.” He dropped from the tree, landing nimbly in the soft underbrush. Grass pleated beneath his shoes.

Itachi moved forward, crimson eyes combing the area until he determined the accurate direction of that signature. Its fire had guttered, stopped, then began again to come forward. It was close now.

“Come out,” he said, a burning bile of apprehension in his throat. 

The figure that stepped out of the shade of trees confirmed what he already knew: he saw Sasuke standing across from him, their gazes matched red to red, his brother’s posture lean and straight and his chin tipped up in defiance. 

“Sasuke,” he whispered.

Above, Aiko called: “Are you serious? Is that your _kid brother_? We don’t have time for this, Itachi!”

She wasn’t wrong. Tense as if in preparation for a dispute, he said to Sasuke, “You shouldn’t be here. You need to go home.”

“I’m coming with you. I already followed this far, so it doesn’t make sense to turn around.”

“It’s not safe. Father told you—”

“I don’t care,” his brother said it crossly, darker look angled this time, obstinate and immovable. “This is just a reconnaissance mission. I’ll be fine.”

“It’s still A-rank.”

“You don’t think I can handle it?”

He noticed frustration bloom within himself, odd to experience for the sake of its rarity and intensity alone, like a hot spark in his gut. “This isn’t about your capability. Not only is it against regulation for a chunin to participate on a mission of this rank, you’re also putting my team at risk. You’ll be a liability.”

Sasuke’s eyes narrowed to slits. He came forward until they were an arm’s reach apart, words lowly deliberate. “I’m not asking you to look after me, I know my own limits. But I won’t let you do this alone. I don’t care what that means for later, I’ll accept the punishment.”

Impossible. What his brother was asking was impossible, because it was Sasuke, and he knew himself, certain beyond any shred of doubt that his attention would wrap around Sasuke’s presence on a battlefield—any battlefield—to the dangerous point of neglect. Yet he could find no refusal for those words. He could not force his younger brother to turn around and leave. He was pushed to surrender, again.

Aiko dropped down, strolling forward with hands on her hips. “You’re going to bring him, aren’t you.” Her pale look shone with distaste through the mask. “Stupid decision, Itachi. You know that.”

“Who are you?” Sasuke snapped at her.

Masashi also leapt from the tree to the ground, bowing low as he said, “A pleasure to meet in the flesh, Sasuke-sama.”

Sasuke made an unsubtle face and shifted away. “Yeah.”

“We’ll reach the border town in a few hours,” Itachi addressed his team, “and my brother will remain there while we complete our objective. I take full responsibility for him. Any repercussions we face upon our return will be my own.”

“So, none,” Aiko said. “You’re the Hokage’s mad dog, he won’t do a thing to his own firstborn.”

Sasuke’s expression darkened, and he whirled on Aiko. “Don’t talk about your captain like that. You shouldn’t even be on his squad.”

“Sasuke,” came the quiet warning.

“Is this how you let your own teammates treat you? How can you trust them?”

“Just because I don’t like you two-faced, nutjob, power-hungry Uchiha doesn’t mean I’d ever forsake a mission,” Aiko spat venomously. “I’m loyal to my village. I keep my personal feelings out of official business.”

“You’d let him die if it happened conveniently,” Sasuke challenged her. “Am I wrong?”

Itachi let out a breath and stepped between the two shinobi, dislike a crackling energy in the air; he felt if he did not intervene they might come to blows. “That’s enough. We need to get moving.”

“Three-point-five hours of daylight left,” Masashi said in a hum, jumping back up into the tree. 

With Itachi in the lead, they set out again—and Sasuke took the rear, headband a brief glint of silver through the trees. It was a foreign sensation to have his brother present on a real mission with him, and not one he found as pleasant as imagined. Although he’d watched Sasuke’s progress over the years and recognized he would soon tackle the jonin rank, it didn’t ease the current of worry in his mind. There was a reason Fugaku had selected Itachi’s team. ANBU were necessary on missions of high variability: it was a situation that could change at any moment. The level of experience and adaptability in agents of ANBU allowed them to make decisions under moments of extreme stress and difficulty.

It would be fine, he told himself. They would leave Sasuke at the inn and continue without him, and Sasuke would simply have to accept this. It was for the best.

If only this assurance could chase away the persistent paranoia that hounded Itachi as they raced through the trees toward their destination.

Over two hours into the journey the sun had begun its westward descent, red through the canopy, its light devoured by the harbinger of a storm—great black clouds took the sky, shrouding the world like an early night. The change was sudden. They lost the last threads of daytime rapidly, and in minutes the first lukewarm sheets of rain emptied from the heavens. All of them were soon drenched. Footing became precarious on slippery branches; visibility plunged as stinging rain assaulted their eyes, wind scything diagonally through the leaves as if nature’s vengeance alone meant to slow them down. 

Itachi saw the world open up in a void of grey mist. He flagged his squadmates and the entire group drew to a halt. Directly ahead, the forest broke at the bank of a large river, its serpentine body twisting north where a ledge of rock sent murky water plunging into shallow falls. There was no easy path across.

“Follow the river south,” he told his team as they all went to the ground, “and we’ll cross wherever it’s safest. Let’s go.”

Meters from the riverbank, Itachi stopped them again. This time he held out his arm in silent command. Red eyes swept the perimeter, tall trees bending beneath the onslaught of heavy rain and wind, sky a slate of grey overhead. His mask was humid on his face from his breath. There was no sound but the storm: the whistle and hiss of pressurized air, the violent lash of water over rocks, the distant rolling thunder.

They were surrounded. Seven shinobi, lethal killing presence masked until the moment they were revealed to his perception. Their figures were wreathed in the storm’s blackness, silhouettes chiseled out of nothing, gloomy phantoms materialized by nightfall. Pale faces gleamed wet like bare bone—features were obscured, unidentifiable, and Itachi could see no evidence of nationality.

There was little time for commands or warning at the ambush. This wasn’t necessary for Aiko and Masashi. Both were there and ready: Aiko slamming a wall of chakra bodily forward, Masashi unraveling a black-ink scroll from his belt. They flanked Itachi to the south and southeast to prevent their captain from being pincered off from the group.

It was trained strategy, and it would provide Itachi the space necessary to analyze their enemies and calculate the surest route of survival—if only he did not have the glaring red flag of his younger brother in his mind.

Behind him, Sasuke had fallen into stance. His own eyes blazed like two bright matchsticks: their gazes met, briefly, and his brother’s expression was steely composed. Itachi’s stomach wanted to plummet. Trained nerves kept him steady. He unsheathed the katana on his back in a scrape of metal, swung it out—

And called over the howling wind, “ _Sasuke_!”

The shinobi were upon them. All other thought was secondary to combat. The first came slicing at Itachi sideways; a kunai bit flesh, and Itachi’s body dissolved into a thousand black wings, illusory birds wheeling into the sky. The shinobi paused in mute shock. Itachi stood a short distance away and lunged to claim that vulnerable window, sliding the point of his blade home with a sick thud through layers of fabric, death gurgling up and out of his opponent as their weight tipped and fell.

Mud painted the ground, a thick slurry that turned slick beneath shoes. Far to the left he saw Aiko rocketing fists and legs at another shinobi, the assault a blur of coordinated movement. Masashi was retrieving a pair of shuriken from someone’s throat.

Heat shimmered sudden in the air and blazed like a second sun across the battlefield. Sasuke’s katon cut a scorching path across the bank, rain steaming where it met fire. He could not see his brother well through the haze; two more shinobi appeared in front of him, and the ground vibrated, a pillar of rock flung his way.

Dodging deftly, his trajectory was interrupted by a third opponent. They swung at his middle. Itachi did not let it catch him as he slid to safety and broke the collision with his own blade. His grip slipped off the hilt of the katana, and it thunked into the muddied earth upon his retreat.

Itachi killed two in a rain of targeted shuriken. As he turned to claim the third in the sightline of sharingan, Sasuke was already there: in his brother’s hand was his own katana, its blade one luminous silver flash when lightning caught the riverbank in a brilliant glare.

Sasuke slashed diagonally across the third opponent’s back. Blood coated the ground, indiscernible against black mud. Torrential rain sloped into the river’s diluted, discolored stream. His brother stood a meter away—hair plastered wetly to cheeks, skin almost translucent where bare, eyes wildfire red. His chest heaved with exertion and his throat was one white line in the dark. In Itachi’s view, his brother’s entire body was illuminated by chakra, boiling hot. Sasuke looked like the savage and radiant arbiter of death: tall, broad, dangerous, and very alive.

This last fact sat heaviest as the battlefield finally began to cool.

Behind him, Masashi was collecting his weapons while Aiko inspected each of the shinobi to ensure they were dead. He paid them no immediate mind. His head ached, adrenaline no longer dulling the irritation.

“Are you all right?” he murmured, pulling the ANBU mask up his face reflexively, as if he didn’t want that barrier between them. 

“Yeah, fine.” Sasuke stepped over the body at his feet. “Here.”

He stared. His brother held out the hilt of his katana; numbly Itachi took it and slid the blade into the home of its sheath. 

“Itachi-sama,” came the low voice of his squadmate. “An unfortunate discovery.”

There was no shock when the headband was placed into his palm. Still it tore his attention from Sasuke and onto the reality ahead, a grim view of death, bodies piled into trenches, destruction clawing spindly hands across the shinobi world. It crystallized all of the waiting dread inside of him.

The band laid across his hand, metal winking under another ribbon of lightning to reveal the twin rocks of Iwa’s village symbol.

—

They arrived at the border town an hour later, filthy and soaked, a silent procession toward an inevitable conclusion. Aiko and Masashi split off at the inn. This was fine by Itachi’s preferences. Rarely did they dwell in one another’s company when not strictly required by protocol, but he knew they would be near if circumstances called upon action.

It was unlikely to happen. Itachi suspected that with those Iwa shinobi dead, they would encounter no more. A scout would doubtless be sent after the assassins, but Itachi’s team would be gone long before then.

His mind carried nothing but static as he shut the door to their shared room. Across from him, Sasuke began to shed the burden of weapons and light armor to the floor, movements quick and jerky. It was not that the inn didn’t have rooms to spare; rather, Itachi could not willfully allow even a wall to separate himself from his brother after the previous battle.

It didn’t matter whether Sasuke had held his own. He could have killed all seven of the enemy shinobi. Itachi would feel the same. Sasuke hadn’t protested, following him up the staircase and down the hall until they’d arrived here. 

They hadn’t spoken a word. Though they had spent their entire lives sharing the same house, the closer intimacy of sleeping within the same space was one lost years ago. Perhaps Sasuke didn’t think of it in those terms. Perhaps he hardly remembered the nights they’d once sought each other’s embrace, finding slumber in that comfort.

Sasuke’s mind seemed to grow more and more unknown. It was an entity outside himself, shaping its own identity, one he could no longer touch.

“Do you want the washroom first?” Sasuke asked him, breaking the quiet.

“No, go ahead. I’ll wait.”

Sasuke looked a moment longer, then nodded and turned.

The noise of water in the pipes was soothing. Itachi let his thoughts drift in the vague act of meditation. He didn’t move from his position by the door, posted like some vigilant guardian over the room. Two futons were squeezed into the small space with heavy curtains over the window, its pane dark at this hour, and a rickety wooden desk took the corner with a chair tucked into its edge. It was a lonely and barren place too huge for its occupants. Itachi could not bring himself to cross the floor, to claim a futon, to relax.

When Sasuke emerged, he was dressed in a pair of loose linen pants, upper body bare except for the towel hung around his throat. His skin glowed warmly pink. This reappearance summoned Itachi into motion; he passed his brother and went into the humid washroom, disregarding the black gaze on his back.

The hot shower wiped him to an empty and weightless existence, uninterrupted by the pattern of thought. When he finished, Itachi mechanically toweled off and dressed for sleep, exhaustion pulling his body into shutdown limb by limb. 

Reentering the main space, he stilled in the doorway.

Sasuke was seated cross-legged on the nearest futon. His head turned, and he pinned Itachi in the immediate crossline of a look made uneasy with emotion. It demanded attention. Sasuke’s brow was smooth but his mouth was down, lips tilted like a sickled brushstroke. He said nothing, waiting, silent and childishly expectant. 

“When we return,” Itachi found himself driven to say, “we’ll need to speak with father about why I allowed you to accompany us on this mission. It was against regulation. I know you understand that, and he may be willing to look past it, but—”

“I don’t want to talk about him.”

He faltered, then pushed on. “It can’t be avoided forever. Circumstances have changed. We’ll leave for Konoha tomorrow, now that we have evidence of Iwa’s involvement. There’s no reason to remain. My willingness in allowing you to accompany us won’t be considered favorably even in light of—”

“That woman was right,” Sasuke cut in. “Father won’t punish you. You don’t even see what he does to you, do you? How he controls you?”

Itachi’s mouth closed.

“And he’s going to continue because you’re strong, more powerful than any other shinobi in the entire village. More than him. Don’t you see what he holds over you because you’ll do anything he says?”

“He’s the Hokage. My wants are secondary to that.”

Itachi watched his brother draw up from the futon in prowling movement, slow and measured, one foot under a leg to carry his weight upright while their gazes never once unhinged from each other. He took steps closer—the distance between them miserably shrunk.

“You made him the Hokage. Why?”

Arrested by that approach, he only said, “It’s complicated.”

“Too complicated to explain to me? I already know some of it. I told you I’m not stupid, and father talks to people when he shouldn’t because he wants them to look at him a certain way, but I don’t trust that. I want to hear it from you.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?” Sasuke demanded, anger rooting itself in his posture as he came forward, eyes sharp and black, damp hair a wild mess. He stood directly in front of Itachi now. He had him bracketed close to the wall, and it was a stark realization to see his brother no longer had the body of a little boy. Muscles sculpted over shoulders and chest through years of effort and diligent training, jawline wire-tight and defined, features hardened. “Why can’t you tell me? Why can’t you just talk to me?”

“Sasuke—”

Hands landed on his upper arms, fingers clasping biceps in a firm hold that refused withdrawal. He felt himself shoved back against the wooden panel of the wall. It didn’t hurt, but Itachi was so stunned he lost the thread of speech as his brother crowded in and kissed him.

This demolished that last shred of calm in his mind, blackening a landscape of thought to soot and ash. Sasuke’s lips were inelegant against his own, but they were hungry as they broke and reformed a tight seal, hot breath wetting joined mouths as it went on, Itachi unable to coax the executive function necessary to end it. Strong fingers wove into his own hair, long strands wet, knuckles tangling with enough pressure to pull on his scalp. Shock kept him pliant and unresisting. Sasuke took advantage, slick tongue licking past the hazard of teeth to taste deeper.

When his younger brother’s body fit in against the front of his own, one limber line of smooth skin and sinew—when a lash of answering arousal in the pit of his own belly betrayed him—Itachi couldn’t go on. He reacted badly. One arm struck Sasuke across that vulnerable ridge of breastbone, _hard_ , and his brother fell back coughing.

“Stop,” Itachi panted, mouth still wet when he scraped his wrist across it, “ _stop_ ,” as if he hadn’t already stopped him.

Sasuke was bent half-over as he struggled to recover from the blow, sucking in a ragged lungful of air. “Itachi…”

“You shouldn’t,” he said, “you should never… with me—”

“Because you’re my brother?” Sasuke’s voice was rough, but he was straightening up, eyes vivid points in the room. “You don’t understand.”

“You should _never_ do that with me, Sasuke.”

“You don’t understand,” his brother repeated darkly. “I want you.”

Itachi went quiet, flattened to the wall, trapped in this moment. The entire world fell away from his attention. It didn’t seem to exist.

“What does it matter if you’re my brother? All that’s proved to me is that you’re more important than anyone, Itachi. You’re all I have left. You’re the only one I’ve ever had.”

It was such a raw admittance he found his eyes dropping away, unable to face the bare strip of emotion on his brother’s face. “No,” he said.

“I’ve wanted you since I was thirteen years old. Before that—my entire life, Itachi. Not always like this, it changed, but I still feel it every day, and I can’t ignore that anymore when I see how the rest of the world treats you. How father treats you, how your own teammates look at you like some deranged monster. I won’t give up on you—”

“ _No_.”

“Give me a reason,” Sasuke said, gaze wide and pleading and furious all at once, a trembling force of nature. His own younger brother. _His_ brother, no one else’s, he would never be anyone else’s, and the way Sasuke looked at him made all of that knowledge plain. It threw into relief Sasuke’s behavior: the distance, the defensiveness, the dogged pursuit at his heels. Something had changed that would never return to the normalcy, for it sat so far in the past they couldn’t reach it now. 

“Give me a reason,” his brother said again. “One that’s actually honest. Tell me you don’t want me like this too. Tell me that, and I’ll accept it. I have to. But don’t send me away until you mean it. Don’t lie to me, and don’t ignore me. I won’t let you do that.”

Itachi eased himself further against the wall and allowed it to hold all of his weight in counterpoint to the burden of those words. His voice sounded like an imitation of conviction. “It’s impossible. It will never work.”

“I don’t need it to work, I just need it. As many times as you decide you’ll give it to me.”

His eyes closed, room plunged to nothing but spatial memory. He sensed Sasuke in front of him, but his brother didn’t move, and that was mercy. Itachi’s entire body ran hot with the desire of wanting to reach out and meet that request, to give Sasuke what he asked because he couldn’t refuse him, never would, but the shame of wrongness kept him still. 

Their father’s face loomed into mind. 

“Let me think.” His voice was eroded to bones, barren and half-mute. “I need to think.”

Without looking up Itachi snatched his cloak from a chair, went to the door, and slid on his shoes. 

He didn’t go far. The late night sweltered in hot humidity, heavy and uncomfortable so soon after bathing. The storm had swept off in another direction, leaving the small, sleeping outpost town clean and vital in its wake. Itachi stared blind at the dark vault of the sky until countless lacy stars merged into an endless glittering sea. He willed himself blank, though every moment continued to latch onto the images of memory: his brother’s eyes, his brother’s lips, his brother’s body.

It felt like a shortcut to insanity.

Twenty minutes or two hours passed this way, and eventually Itachi returned to the corridor outside their room, but it was here he stopped. His back found the wall beside the door and he sank down it. Hands cradled his head, fingernails clawed his scalp, knees bent to his chest. He maintained this position in the empty hall an indefinite length of time, stirred at last by the first bird calls of dawn.


	3. Chapter 3

_“You have to carry the fire.”_  
— Cormac McCarthy, The Road

PART III.

—

His father’s study was shrouded in dark apart from a glittering candle in the corner of the room, singular flame casting frenetic shadow over thin shoji screens. Itachi watched long enough his retinas carried the tiny flickering afterimage when he closed his eyes. It was a small and fragile illumination he knew could engulf the entire room with its uncontrolled, diminutive power in minutes.

To his left, Sasuke was seated on the floor with both hands in his lap. His head bowed slightly forward. 

“It was my fault,” Itachi told their father. “I allowed Sasuke to accompany the team on our mission. It would have been wiser to have him return to the village, but with circumstances as they were—”

“I understand.” Fugaku waved one hand in a short, aborted movement. Both sons looked over. “Even if it was disobedient, you made a judgment call as any good shinobi is expected to do in such moments. Luckily for your brother, it did not result in his death.” 

This statement was directed to Sasuke, whose gaze dropped once more.

“You should consider the burden you placed on Itachi,” their father said. “What would have happened if the enemy had killed you on the battlefield? He would’ve been responsible for putting you there.”

“I know that—” 

“It’s fine,” Itachi spoke between them. “Sasuke held his own against our opponents. I’m impressed with the growth I witnessed in his abilities.”

“Nonetheless, he should remember that his actions have consequences, and those consequences impact other people.”

“I know that!” Sasuke’s voice rose, and he half-stood from the tatami mats as though driven by a core of anger. “Don’t you think I know that? But it’s my choice and I wasn’t going to let him go alone—”

“Sit down, boy,” Fugaku snapped. “Keep in mind you’re still a chunin. When I give an assignment to your brother, it’s because I expect shinobi of ANBU caliber to handle it. That is well above your rank.”

“It’s not because of the ANBU,” Sasuke said, glowering as he knelt back down. “It’s because it’s Itachi.”

The moment languished between all three of them, Itachi’s eyes drawn back to the lonely candle. Its flame jumped and guttered from an invisible wind. He couldn’t determine how his brother’s words caused him to feel. There was fatigue permanently fixtured in his waking life now, but there was also fresh relief and understanding, like a trickle of water to a man dying of thirst. This sensation caused him to lose time until their father spoke again and brought him back.

“I’ve decided to look past this,” Fugaku said, “in light of Iwagakure’s involvement. That takes precedence now. I will need to call a meeting with both the clan and the council, so I will not be punishing either of you. However, I hope you will consider the gravity of your own actions. Sasuke, apologize to your brother.”

“That’s unnecessary—”

“I’m sorry,” Sasuke said, eyes on his lap. Itachi glanced over, uneasy with the knee-jerk desire to reject that apology. 

“Thank you. You’re both dismissed.”

The door slid shut behind them as they left the study. When Itachi turned toward the hall, he was stopped by fingers hooking his wrist.

“Itachi,” his brother said. The corridor was unlit, so it became impossible to guess the expression on Sasuke’s face, and he was forced to read him by tone alone. Sasuke sounded raspy and unsure. “Can we talk?”

The arm that Sasuke held tingled, staticky from an imprisoned wrist up to his bicep. He thought he might crawl out of his skin, or react worse, violently forcing Sasuke to let him free like before. Their father was too close— _right there_.

“Not right now.”

“When?”

He closed his eyes and let out a breath. “Later. Tonight.”

“Come to my room,” Sasuke said, then released his wrist, footsteps signaling his retreat down the hall. Itachi didn’t move again until he felt his racing pulse begin to tire and slow.

—

The house held the quiet of a tomb, shut up and gravely sepulchered, each corridor a black tunnel that terminated in a closed door. He needed no light to carry him to his destination. He knew it by heart. Their rooms were not far apart, no matter how it felt otherwise. His path carried him by the cellar room, sealed and empty in the years since their mother’s death, then around the corner and down the next hall.

And he arrived.

Itachi stood outside long enough that he was certain his brother was aware of it, but still he waited, hanging on the verge of decision. He knew as soon as he entered it would not be possible to undo the action. The threshold of Sasuke’s room was the divide of two separate futures: the one where he turned, left, and went to the shelter of solitude and better morality; and the one where his fingers found the groove of the door’s handle, wiping away those last footprints in the sand. 

An abandonment of this conversation would be answer enough. Perhaps it would even be a good reason—one Sasuke could accept without his having to say it—but even if that wasn’t the case there would be nowhere else to go. It would be another refusal like so many he’d given his younger brother in the past. The right decision, the only decision.

Itachi’s hand found the seal of the door and slid it open.

The room was another world. Milky moonlight flooded its interior through paned windows, pooling across paneled wood and bare floor. The desk was chaotically ordered: scrolls unraveled and halfheartedly retied, ink pots beside calligraphy tools, books stacked in misshapened piles. Sasuke’s bed was made, its sheets tucked all the way around the edges. It smelled like his brother: wood smoke, metal, musk of sweat and the clean undertone of laundered clothes. 

All of this tipped ninety degrees out of his mind as he saw Sasuke himself, cross-legged on the floor just outside a slant of light. He had something in his lap. A book with its pages angled into the moon’s glare. This was swiftly abandoned as Sasuke got to his feet.

“You came,” he said.

Itachi paused by the door, fingertips shutting it at his back.

“Itachi,” Sasuke said, striding closer. They were not far apart now. His brother’s expression was calm and open in a way he wasn’t accustomed, features relaxed, eyes like two clear stones as they fixed on him. “I wasn’t trying to cause you trouble on the mission.”

He stayed quiet. He couldn’t look away from his brother’s face—all its smooth lines, his profile caught in the silvery relief of the window, familiarity turned new.

Unaffected, Sasuke continued, “I acted without thinking, but I’m tired of seeing him order you around. You do his dirty work and he takes the credit for it. He doesn’t care what it does to you. It’s not fair.”

On this final word Itachi lifted his hand, scooped his brother’s chin into his palm, and leaned to kiss him.

It was far less the unbridled, desperate urgency of the first time, instead gentled into a semblance of careful affection. Sasuke immediately surged to meet him. Lips slid into a firmer lock and arms snaked around his waist, driving him back against the closed door with a rattle of wood. Itachi broke off to hiss, “ _Sasuke_.”

“Shh.”

“The door—”

Sasuke’s mouth landed over his own, again and again, close-lipped and feverish with ticklish breath. Their bodies met in a single, solid line from collar to pelvic bone. His brother radiated warmth through the thin fabric of sleepclothes. He could feel fingers digging into the angular divot of his hips as Sasuke kept him trapped against the door frame—an illusion of imprisonment, because they both knew if Itachi wished to be free, he would be.

After several seconds of this pawing, panting question, Itachi’s lips parted and he allowed his brother’s tongue into his mouth, slippery and scalding as it lapped into that vulnerable space. Itachi’s entire body flushed to the alien sensation of its invasion. He let Sasuke kiss him this way until he was fulfilled, until he’d scoured and mapped and tasted every inch inside, until the threat for air became too much. They separated, breathless.

Sasuke’s head drooped down, overwarm brow tucked into Itachi’s shoulder. “Have you ever been with anyone else like this?” he said, haltingly. 

It was not at all what he thought Sasuke would ask. “Have you?”

“Nothing that counted.” Sasuke’s expression twisted, thinking. “Tell me.”

There was no use lying. “No,” he admitted. The depth of his practical knowledge in this realm was shallow, but it didn’t mean he was ignorant. Learning such a dimension of relationships was important for shinobi who would confront seduction and sexual manipulation on missions. “Why?”

“Because,” Sasuke said lowly. “I wanted to know.” The hands on Itachi’s hips swept up to his shoulders, and he was dragged away from the door and led to the bed. “I wanted to be the only person to touch you.”

Panic slithered up into Itachi’s throat, at odds with a rush of arousal so abrupt his pulse spiked. “We shouldn’t.”

“What are you afraid of?” Demanding hands guided him down. 

“Something like that,” Itachi said as he caught his brother by the wrists, “while father is in the house…”

“He won’t hear us unless you’re noisy.”

Itachi’s mouth closed and he allowed himself to be pushed, perching at the edge of the mattress, posture uncomfortably rigid. Sasuke’s palms swept across his shoulders and down his outer arms. 

“You have no idea how you look,” his brother said as he loomed over him, a dark shadow cut out of the light. They kissed again, deep and slick, a devouring drag of tongue over tender gums and teeth. It forced Itachi’s head to crane up at a sharp angle. After, Sasuke went on: “You don’t see it. I already knew that so it doesn’t surprise me, but… nii-san, you’re beautiful. How was I ever supposed to want anyone else?”

It was not in his nature to feel embarrassment, but those words caught him close to it, an emotion second cousin to distress. “You should stop talking,” he advised instead. “We need to be quiet.”

Sasuke’s black eyes narrowed on his face. “Fine.”

A bent knee met the bed, and Itachi was coaxed back onto his elbows while fingers unwound the tie from his hair so it fell in a sleek curtain. Sasuke combed through it, coaxing Itachi’s head to tilt again and fit their mouths together, continuing these slickly obscene kisses as he was flattened over the blanket. 

It was no sudden shift. Whatever Sasuke’s experience, he was targeted in his slow progression, and it seemed he could not be pried from his brother’s mouth in the pursuit of his goal. Every kiss was wetter, became sloppier and misaligned, until Sasuke was dragging his tongue inelegantly into the open gape of his mouth over and over. Itachi’s lips were red and swollen by then. Saliva cooled at the corners as Sasuke climbed on top of him.

Too warm, but not heavy. Powerful thighs claimed Itachi’s lap as their hips fit together, fabric unable to disguise the thickened line of Sasuke’s cock now wedged between covered bodies. It brought a tide of raw recognition to Itachi, who sucked in air and could not keep his eyes open, could not puzzle himself between grief and guilt and wild, destructive, consuming lust. 

A hand pulled his shirt up, exposing his flat sternum. Sasuke’s wet red mouth descended onto it. He sucked at nipples until the skin around them became tight and pink, then sunk south. Itachi’s belly flinched taut beneath his brother’s hot, gusting breath. His eyelids cracked and his gaze fixed on the ceiling above. His entire body was stiff and still as he felt Sasuke’s palm center over his breastbone, holding him down.

The same hand peeled his waistband down in an undignified, unromantic yank. It caught the head of his cock, snapped it against his belly, then tugged further.

Now Itachi was half-stripped, pants a restrictive band across thighs and skin exposed from chest to hips in one line. The weight and intensity of Sasuke’s eyes as he admired him was unbearable. His cock lay flush to his stomach, drooling pale filaments in the light from the window.

Even prepared for the inevitability, he had no defense for how his brother’s mouth felt as it licked every last wet thread of precome from that slit, then opened and swallowed him down without pretense or pause. It was sheer miracle Itachi did not thrash on the bed from the suddenness. Hot pleasure filled him up to the burning brim, all centered on the tight channel of his brother’s throat. There was nothing but pressure and wetness and an unending high.

He was dimly aware of movement as Sasuke lifted off, tongue dragging at tender foreskin and lathing the flushed head of his dick in saliva, but it was background noise. Sasuke sloped diligently over his lap and sucked him off with immoral devotion; it could have gone on forever, it could have lasted two minutes.

Itachi’s mind swam to the surface when a hot hand clapped over his mouth. “Nii-san,” Sasuke said, lips tucked into the seam of a thigh as he tongued over the root of his older brother’s cock. “I warned you not to be noisy.”

Had he made noise? Reality was too distant and unhinged to tell, but if he had, he could not imagine himself uttering anything else but the same litany: _Sasuke, Sasuke, Sasuke._

Now he panted silently for breath beneath his brother’s humid palm. His head went back and loose hair hung over his face, eyes shut, muscles wound into a brittle prelude of orgasm. When it came—in one hot, blistering rush—Sasuke drank it down. He could feel his throat work over each pulse until he was dry, and even then Sasuke lingered, tongue lapping at the tip to a point where Itachi did finally thrash to tear out of the hold. Sasuke held him, wouldn’t immediately let him.

Then lips slid off his softening cock in noisy slickness and he was freed. His brother loomed above with a nasty, shiny-wet smirk.

Itachi had to look away from it. 

He had a bizarre thought, that if this was the threat of seduction, of sex, it was no wonder shinobi fell into the trap so often, no wonder proper training was so valued. He couldn’t imagine ever possessing the willpower to deny the look on his brother’s face.

Or perhaps Sasuke was the exception.

“You’re beautiful,” Sasuke said again, prowling so he knelt on hands and knees, reaching to free himself from the restriction of his own pants. Itachi watched in delirium as his brother jerked himself off like that, posed predatorily above, black eyes slanted and intimating a command not to turn away. It wasn’t long before Sasuke’s head drooped and his shoulders tensed and he came, spilling hot seed across his bare chest and belly in sticky stripes. 

It was impossible not to stare at this garish picture.

Too soon his faculties began to return to him. Itachi made a face when he noticed a thread of come at the ends of his hair, and he reached to scrape it off. Sasuke slid off the bed and went to the dresser. When he returned it was to clean the remainder from Itachi’s skin with a soft cloth; this was summarilty abandoned on the floor. Sasuke climbed back over him and they tangled into an embrace.

“You tasted good,” his brother said into his ear. “I didn’t think you would come that quick.”

As those words scorched straight through Itachi, he abruptly shifted and rolled to pin Sasuke beneath him, one arm a crossbow over his collar. They both were a mess: wrinkled and displaced clothes, ruffled hair and red mouths, stretches of white skin on display like indecent pornography. 

“I wasn’t expecting your impatience.” Itachi kept his voice even despite his own state. His younger brother tilted a look of daring challenge up.

“I told you,” Sasuke said, “I’ve wanted you forever.”

“More than kissing is—”

“All of it is wrong. Don’t tell me that like you didn’t know when you came in here.” Sasuke’s look was hard and certain. “It doesn’t bother me if it’s you.”

Itachi’s rational mind warred in protest, acknowledging the need to end this, here and now, despite the equally urgent desire to bend down and savage Sasuke’s mouth of the taste of himself. 

He never made a decision, attention dragged out of the room by instinct.

There were footsteps down the hall. The floorboards creaked, subtle and trained even when not trying to conceal a presence. Their father.

Carefully he withdrew from Sasuke one limb at a time, slow and deliberate in the movement to the floor. He stood upright and stared at the door.

Their father did not pause at Sasuke’s room, passing instead to go deeper into the house. This mercy didn’t ease Itachi’s alarm, not when he knew it was possible their father sought him at this late hour, and he would be suspicious if Itachi wasn’t in his room when he arrived. And if he was suspicious enough, it was no difficult task to search. 

The dark cloud of that threat drifted over his head.

Itachi straightened himself with quick hands and retamed his hair, then stepped into the corridor on silent heels, leaving Sasuke heavy-browed and frowning on the bed.

There was Fugaku outside his bedroom, knuckles centimeters from the wood. “Father,” he announced. He was glad his tone kept its measured volume.

“You’re not in your room?”

“No… I couldn’t sleep. I was outside.”

He couldn’t see his father’s face well in shadow, but the man’s posture was relaxed, unordinary body language for him these days. “Ah, I understand. There are some nights I go and walk through the garden myself, just to clear my own head.”

Itachi said nothing.

“I came to tell you that tomorrow there will be a clan meeting to address the concerns about Iwagakure,” his father went on, heedless. “I expect you’ll be there?”

“Of course. Thank you for telling me, father.”

“You speak so stiffly with me,” Fugaku said, chuckling. “Has it always been that way? It’s hard to know, at times.”

Itachi tensed at his father’s approach, turning his back to the wall to allow him to pass. 

“I’d hoped, with everything…” 

A hand came down on his shoulder. It was large and heavy, and for a moment he feared somehow through this contact Fugaku would become aware of the secret act his sons had committed in the other room, that his father’s gaze would peel into his inner thoughts, that he would smell the scent of sex on him. Itachi’s entire body kept rigid as if standing at the edge of a sheer drop.

“I suppose I’d hoped it would bring us closer. Yet you still act so distantly,” Fugaku said. “Perhaps that’s just your nature. It’s good to see you behaving respectfully, but in light of things… Hm.”

The moment did not move forward. He became aware of a faint odor: the bitter, astringent vapor of fermented rice. Alcohol. His father’s behavior fit into a logical picture, then.

“I should try to sleep,” Itachi said quietly. He felt prisoner beneath the hand on his shoulder.

“Yes. Of course.” Fugaku pulled away, venturing back down the hall. “Goodnight, Itachi.”

Itachi stayed still until his father had retreated around the corner, then followed, looked, and caught a glimpse of Fugaku passing Sasuke’s bedroom. Sasuke was posed in the threshold with his arms crossed. 

There was overt anger on his brother’s face. It drew his features dark with stress. When that volatile look landed on Itachi, it closed like a fist, and he left the doorway.

—

Summer’s reign over Konoha approached an end, its forests wilting and coloring in a glory of burnished shades. In the pink light of sunrise, Itachi arrived at the Hokage’s administrative building in uniform, round-eyed fox mask concealing his face. A few of the guards posted outside gave him furtive glances, but they went ignored as he entered, taking the stairs to the topmost floor. Here the corridor was deserted. It led to a pair of double doors, Konoha’s insignia bisected by the center seam.

The council’s congregation would be gathered inside. They had been shut up since the first pale blade of daylight had cut the horizon. 

In front of these doors, Itachi paused and looked out the near window to see the vista of surrounding wilderness, specks of birds mid-flight in a spotless sky. Another world coming to gentle life in another day.

Over a month had passed since his team’s return from their mission. The Uchiha clan had met on a total of five occasions to discuss the situation, far more than usual in that window of time. And Itachi had attended each one, duty bound. 

It was those meetings that brought him here now.

The door opened. On the other side was another ANBU agent, their mask the oval features of a rat with slitted eyeholes. The agent gestured for him to enter. He followed them in and looked over the nondescript room: its stone walls were painted smooth earthen green, a long table of glossy brown wood at its center with a singular window shuttered to the dawn.

It was a room he knew. He had not seen it for years, not since shortly after the coup’s success, but its interior remained impervious to age. Or perhaps this was an illusion constructed by dutiful care and regular maintenance; it was difficult to tell at first study.

He had killed the original council members in this room. 

Itachi kept his line of sight near the floor, falling to customary respect, and took up post to the right of the door. 

Seats at the table were already occupied, members of the council fanned around its edge. Uchiha Tekka sat beside Uchiha Haya, the individuals installed after the coup’s success. The other two, Nara Kurou and Ito Hiroyoshi, were appointed through careful selection in yet another guise of village-wide cooperation, their faces stern and creased with experience that did not strictly come from age.

Then there was his father at the head of the table, hands flat as he leaned forward in full Hokage regalia. A map was spread out in front of him. 

It appeared Itachi had arrived in media res a broiling argument.

“You are exaggerating,” the Nara said. “One skirmish is not indicative of further conflict.”

“They were ambushed. We can’t ignore that fact. Iwa was prepared for them,” Fugaku replied sharply.

“Purely conjecture—”

“Perhaps you should listen more than you speak.” Uchiha Haya’s voice was gentle, commanding, and frigid. “Your Hokage deserves respect, and you forget your place.”

Nara Kurou’s expression changed, folding into bitter acquiescence. “Of course. Please accept my apologies. It is only that we are concerned for the village. Engaging unnecessarily with the shinobi of other nations is a risk, as it brings more attention and likewise more violence to Konoha’s border.”

“So should we sit on our hands, then?” Tekka’s thin, smarmy voice came. “Allow our own shinobi to be targeted?”

“That is not at all what I am suggesting.”

“I understand,” Fugaku said, seizing back control of the flow of debate. “However, Konoha cannot repeat the mistakes of the past. By taking initiative, we can maintain control over the situation. We can’t allow ourselves to cower back from a potential threat until the point it overwhelms us, or we will find ourselves at the mercy of another village. Or else dead entirely. We have seen that result in the past, haven’t we?”

The room fell to a drifting stillness. Itachi’s gaze remained on his feet as despair drew out like a tide in his body, pulling, preventing the intake of air. He thought he could hear the distant birds through an open window somewhere else, but it may have only been his imagination; this room was closed up and far from reach.

There were eyes on him. He could feel the press of attention, though he didn’t lift his head. His presence was acknowledged.

“What is your directive, Fifth?” Ito Hiroyoshi said, Kurou silent at his side now. They knew better than to speak against the power of the Uchiha in the room. It was why they were allowed to be present at all.

“We will redouble the current guard at the gates,” Fugaku said plainly and precisely, because this was an agenda he had already crafted long before they all arrived. Another formality. Itachi felt sure of that. “Additionally, we will further restrict access to and from the village, establishing better security at Konoha’s perimeter. I will have select teams sent on scouting missions in the surrounding territory. We can expand our boundary of patrol to include more of Fire Country’s land. Now that we are aware of the presence of this threat, we can prepare ourselves for it.”

Itachi allowed his shoulder to lean and touch the wall as he listened to his father’s familiar voice constructing the future he knew would come to pass. He had known. Danzou had known it too, and Danzou was correct, for all his whispers and sly, dangerous promises of darkness. 

“Konoha will not be underestimated,” Fugaku said. “Neither will the Uchiha clan. Iwagakure has crossed us before, but never again—we will be known throughout every country and every hidden village for our power and superiority. Certainly they will fear ever crossing the Uchiha name again.”

 _The Uchiha name_.

Against better judgment, Itachi lifted his chin. His sight passed over his father’s face. There he saw a well-known expression of these past few years, one sealed in anger far beyond this room and manifested in the dread grief of a woman’s murder. One old and mangled in the warfare of a world since ended, unable to grow outside the violent container in which it had lived so long.

Then Fugaku’s head turned, and he saw only the man’s profile, lines of age around eyes and mouth. 

The council’s conversation continued, although its details were a grey and oily nothingness in his head, easy to ignore and forget. He heard no more that mattered. In the wake of his father’s declaration, there would be little to discuss. Tomorrow was decided.

When he was dismissed, Itachi went down the hall to the stairs. His mind hung in a blank state that carried no thought. It was not an unfamiliar place to exist. He accessed it each time he ended someone’s life, on a mission or on the street. Perhaps similar to his father, he had lived in this realm of consciousness for his entire life—or at least since Danzou stood across from him and described the meaning of darkness. 

Where there is light, there is dark. Where there is joy and happiness, there is suffering and cruelty. 

Only the one who lived in that dark could see all possible futures.

It made sense to him before that impossible decision had placed itself at his feet, torn between the certain death of his entire clan and the potential of future war. It made sense until he was asked to commit a worse atrocity than he had even the imagination to invent. 

Now, there were no longer two parts: Konoha and the clan. They had long since bled into a unified entity of honor, loyalty, pride—power. They could not be divided by light and dark. Perhaps nothing truly could, or should be, and the struggle to do so would always end in defeat, and this, all of it…

It was pointless.

Itachi stopped abruptly in the corridor. Ahead of him, his younger brother stood with crossed arms. His gaze looked anticipatory and impatient. “Itachi,” he said, coming forward. “Are you done?”

“What are you doing here?”

“I had to turn in a report downstairs. They told me there was a council meeting when I asked about father. I assumed you’d be with him,” Sasuke said, simple words to disguise truer meaning: _I wanted to see you_. “What was it about?”

“Not here,” Itachi lowered his voice, stepping so the distance whittled down between them. His hand found Sasuke’s arm in a delicate touch.

“Okay,” Sasuke said, shaking off that grasp only to ensnare their fingers and pull.

A cautionary glance over his shoulder ensured that no one witnessed his brother hauling him into the nearest supply closet. It was a dim, dusty, cramped space with storage boxes stacked in corners and crowded shelves. None of this lit even a fragment of his attention. As soon as the door clicked shut, they reached for one another.

Sasuke pushed up his ANBU mask, hands cupping either side of his face and steering him seamlessly into a kiss. It was a mutual movement, lips covering lips, need feeding a hunger met by the first hot lash of a tongue. They crowded in between the shelves and sealed their bodies together.

Itachi didn’t take any air that was not from his brother’s mouth. It went on until he was starry, half-drunk, Sasuke’s fingers making a tangle of neatly tied hair. When at last they separated, mouths wet, his brother spoke into the space between them. “I missed you.”

“It hasn’t been that long,” Itachi said in one exhale.

“You won’t let me touch you in the house. I barely see you outside of it.”

“You see me right now.”

His younger brother hissed, kissed him again harshly, and dragged their hips together in a tight, circular grind. “That’s not what I meant. Don’t act like that, I know you want me too, you’re already getting hard.”

“Sasuke,” came in a warning tone, hands catching his brother around the waist at another desperate rut of friction. “It isn’t a good idea here.”

“Is it ever a good idea anywhere?” 

Despite himself, Itachi was smiling, wan and thin and unnatural on his mouth. He had forgotten the council’s room and his father’s words. The touch on Sasuke’s middle smoothed to a surer hold, arm looping to steer his younger brother back, guidance that shoved him across the closet and against the other wall. Itachi trapped him here—leaned over, cupped his cheek in a brief caress—then flicked his forehead.

“Itachi!”

“Wait a few minutes before you follow me out, otouto.” He turned to leave, but a hand took his wrist hard enough to throb. 

“Hold on,” Sasuke said. “Tonight, after father’s asleep, meet me by the northwest watchtower.” 

The grip was released, and Itachi’s fingers found the door handle without looking back, knowing that if he did it would become even more difficult to go.

—

The watchtower Sasuke chose was at the furthest edge of the village perimeter, tucked into a copse and shrouded from the street. Itachi hid his presence as he looked up at the towering structure. A pair of torches on the platform identified the presence of Uchiha guards on night duty. So high up, they wouldn’t see him, but this didn’t erase a sense of unease in Itachi. It was less concern for himself and more the towers that he disliked, knowing they stood as sentinels over the village, where no one could enter or exit unseen. No one could choose to leave. No one could flee.

Sasuke found him soon after, sharingan a bright signal as he navigated the shadows to his brother, approaching from behind. “You’re here,” he said, as if this mere fact marveled him. Itachi felt fingers seeking his own, braiding in a loose hold. “I want to show you something.” 

“We shouldn’t linger too late,” Itachi warned as he was led by that hand. “If father wakes up and discovers we aren’t home…”

“You’re too paranoid,” Sasuke said. “We’ll tell him we went out to train. I don’t care and he won’t either, as long as he wants to believe it.”

“He’ll be suspicious.”

“He’ll listen if it comes from you.” 

Itachi watched his brother’s profile as they walked through the hemmed shade of trees, features inexplicably softened in the pale light of the moon. “You assume he always listens to me.”

“Then tell him you snuck out to see Izumi,” Sasuke said sharply. “Make up some excuse he’ll like.”

“And you?”

His brother’s head turned, a haughty look on his face. “He won’t care where I was.”

They did not speak again for several minutes, Sasuke reeling him in a slow, circuitous path around the watchtower where they were protected from sight by thick trees and underbrush. When at last they came upon the outermost wall of Konoha, Sasuke stopped. Their fingers untangled. 

“There,” he said, pointing.

It took a moment of careful study to see what it was Sasuke had indicated: an area near the base of the wall was amiss, like a detail smudged to imperfection and repainted to blend into its surroundings. Itachi stepped nearer. He noticed the edge of a tan tarp sticking out beneath piled stones and dirt; closer inspection revealed an entire patch of ground disguised this way. Sasuke moved ahead of him, took the corner of the tarp and pulled, peeling off the cover. The wall was cracked wide open where it met earth and a channel had been dug beneath it, large enough it could easily fit a person of their size on hands and knees. 

“This leads into the forest. No one knows about it but me.”

“Did you make this?” Itachi asked, stunned. 

His brother glanced to him. “I exploited a vulnerability that already existed in the wall’s defenses.”

“So you did,” Itachi said, unable to help the quiet humor. “And how often are you sneaking out of Konoha against regulation?”

“Often enough.” He reached for Itachi’s hand once more, guiding him insistently forward. “Hurry up and go through, I don’t like leaving it exposed. I don’t want anyone else to find it.”

Obediently Itachi went to his knees in the dry dirt and maneuvered through the narrow crawl space. He felt Sasuke lower down behind him, heard the rustling of the tarp, then directed his attention to the light ahead. The tunnel reached a depth of about three meters—an easy obstacle. He emerged on the other side to black and yawning miles of wilderness. 

Sasuke appeared soon after, kicked a few branches into place, then turned to join him. 

“This side isn’t as well disguised,” Itachi noticed. “You might consider finding another tarp for it.”

“No one ever patrols over here.”

“I don’t mean the guards, although it pays to prepare for every possibility,” he said, gaze raking over the deep midnight of their surroundings. “There could be others attempting to get in.”

“Into Konoha? Why?”

Itachi shook his head. The answer was too complicated, now, in this rare sliver of privacy Sasuke had carved out for them. 

“Does it have to do with the Iwa shinobi?” his brother pressed, moving until they stood close.

“What are we doing out here, Sasuke?”

“You never answer my questions directly,” Sasuke said, “and you still won’t talk to me.” He stopped, frowning. They looked at each other. Then his brother relented and reached once more for his hand, guiding, taking them into the fringe of trees. “We’re almost there.”

This walk was longer. He considered suggesting they run, but there was a small and remarkable intimacy to Sasuke’s hand linked with his own, and he didn’t wish to surrender that tether. Their palms were in warm contact for the duration of the journey. In time they emerged from dark forest into open sky. Itachi found himself overlooking a vast lake, still and silver in the late hour. The swollen moon reflected off its surface like a flat sheet of ice.

“Lake Tsuki,” he said, low and quiet. “I haven’t seen it in years.”

“I thought so.” Sasuke led him forward until they both stood on the lakeshore, where the ground was softer under their heels. “I come out here to be alone. To think and get away from the village, from…” He didn’t have to finish; Itachi heard it. _Father_. 

Their hands were still interlocked, and Itachi felt a thumb on the inside of his wrist, passing gently across the point of his pulse. It stroked this patch over and over. 

Itachi pulled his brother closer to kiss him. Even with the wash of moonlight over their skin, he felt invisible and out of sight of the world. Nothing could touch him, no one could reach him. No one but the person who mattered most.

Eventually they separated, quiet apart from their panting breath. Sasuke drew off the cloak around his shoulders and spread it over the grass. Then he put his hands on Itachi’s shoulders and pushed him down.

As in Sasuke’s bedroom, he allowed this, kneeling and reclining back on the cloak as his brother followed, forcing legs to widen. Sasuke slotted into this space. He cradled Itachi’s face and kissed him again desperately, fingers untying and untangling the curtain of his older brother’s long hair. Palms were on his hips, pawing up and beneath fabric to scour bare muscle. He gripped Itachi’s waist and pressed their hips together in a hard grind.

It was the same intoxication of a month ago, his brother’s weight heavy and solid where it sat between his knees. The hot, wet mouth revisiting his own each cold minute they were apart. He couldn’t think. He didn’t want to.

His brother’s hands began to strip him in quick, frantic tugs that exposed white skin. The night air was a contrast to Sasuke’s searing mouth, and every touch radiated hunger.

“I want to fuck you this time,” Sasuke announced bluntly, words scraping in that low tone. He bent into the crook of Itachi’s throat and nosed its pulse. “No one will bother us out here.”

“Anyone can see us from the treeline,” Itachi said, surprised he sounded remotely articulate.

Sasuke’s expression darkened. “We have our eyes for a reason.” And sharingan flashed bloody across his sight. “You’d let me. Even though you could stop me whenever you wanted, you’re strong enough… you’d still let me fuck you here.”

The words scorched him, closing tight in his chest as his brother’s touch mapped the length of his body, nearly nude, stripped from throat to calves. His own eyes remained dormant black. It was a unique experience to feel Sasuke’s red scrutiny across him, like being pressed to a live flame, one he knew he could challenge—and obliterate—if he chose. 

And he chose not to. 

“You’re already so hard, nii-san,” Sasuke said in that same low, goading voice, head dipping over a flat abdomen to paint humid breath even lower. “Look at you.”

Itachi didn’t have to, although the demand coaxed a glance. His cock lay almost flat to his thigh, flushed and darkly ruddy in lewd display of arousal. He saw Sasuke looking at it, too, ravenous gaze devouring the view as kisses skated his inner leg.

His own hands lowered, combing through Sasuke’s bristly hair, petting it off his brow. Still he didn’t speak. There was no guidance in the hold, yet Sasuke seemed obedient to it nonetheless. That mouth dropped and tongued his cock briefly, enough to lap the slit into a gleaming and sticky mess, then went lower, sucking at balls, tongue lathing the tender skin just behind.

A touch widened his legs further apart, heels off the cloak and on the dirt. When callused fingertips dragged into the crease of his ass, they were oily and wet, rubbing circles into the tight clench of muscle at his hole. 

It was alien and uncomfortable and electrifying. Itachi took in a sharp breath and pushed upright. His brother was there, shushing gently, kissing his cheek and jaw and the bridge of his nose. Who had taught him something so lewd, or had he learned on his own? Was this obscene education purposeful in order to be used against his older brother? And how long, exactly, had Sasuke imagined this scenario?

For every reassurance of lips on his face, the efforts of hands on his body become more greedy and coaxing. One palm closed over his waist to encourage stillness as two fingers pried him open, knuckles twisted to stretch the tight hole. Itachi was aware of his own breath: the short, uneven inhales and the hot, explosive exhales. 

“Relax,” Sasuke said to him, mouth covering his own. He spoke into the steadily messier kiss. “Your body’s too tense, nii-san. You need to let me in.”

An impossible length of time passed. He was urged back down, kissed deeply, and fucked open on his brother’s fingers for long enough his entire body ached to endure it. Places were hot and burning—his ass, his flushed face, his taut belly, the leaking head of his dick, the hip Sasuke held fast—while the rest of him turned frigid from exposure to midnight wind. It was a state that kept him awake, alive, aware of the moment Sasuke hauled him down the cloak and aligned the blunt tip of his cock, oil-slicked, and pushed inside of him. 

A tortured sound left his mouth, Sasuke quick to suck it from his tongue. He was full to the very brim. His brother took him like this, hands an iron clasp around hips to complete every thrust with brutal precision, hauling up legs, bending Itachi near in half and fucking him into the earth. The cloak was wrinkled and bunched beneath his elbows and shoulders and the warm back of his head. Itachi fell to senselessness in a way he never had. Taken by animal instinct, he held Sasuke’s shoulders and clawed nails over his spine, twisting his body, voice pouring out against self-possession. All of his cold meticulous logic shattered at each slick collision, at each rejoining, Sasuke’s cock dragging in and out of him to a delirious rhythm. It was wild, incoherent madness.

Even after Sasuke came—a burning rush he felt fill him up—it didn’t stop. They kissed each other raw and swollen, Sasuke’s eyes luminous red in the dark. Then their positions subverted as he was hauled into his brother’s lap. On knees now, lean frame exposed and hair hanging sleek, Itachi allowed himself to be fucked a second time. It skirted an exhaustion so body-deep and familiar he couldn’t tell it apart from battle. At the end of it he was sore and exhausted and his inner thighs were slick with wet, dripping come that coaxed a look of pleased gratification back to his brother’s face.

Then they lay together, panting, Sasuke’s gaze black though it never left the side of his face. He felt fingertips trailing up his heat-chilled spine. The touch strayed down one arm, over the coiling black ink of his ANBU tattoo, then further away, down to a bruised hip bone. A thumb pressed in. He saw Sasuke smirk.

“I like seeing you this way,” his brother told him. 

“How?” Itachi’s eyelids were heavy, mind stunningly blank.

“Calm.” Sasuke squirmed in closer at his side. “You always look like you’re trying to be calm, but it’s not the same as this.”

“Trying to be calm… I don’t know what you mean.”

“Maybe I’m the only one who can tell,” Sasuke said. “When you’re just hiding it, I mean. You usually are.”

His bare feet were touching the damp, dewy grass of the lakeshore. The mutual warmth between them was enough to keep most of the night’s cold at bay, even as an breeze blew across Lake Tsuki, disrupting the silver moon’s reflection.

“Do you know what war is, Sasuke?” he said suddenly.

That gaze pressed into him. “Of course I do. Shinobi have fought in wars between other villages for years.”

“I don’t mean what they discuss in the Academy’s history books.” Itachi’s voice had dropped in volume to a stern, flat tone. “Actual war. There are some things that cannot be understood without the experience. Knowing how wars are caused, how they affect villages, how they progress… Those facts are secondary to the feeling of standing on the field, seeing and smelling the truth of war.”

“I don’t get it,” Sasuke said. “I’ve been on battlefields enough times.”

“Not like this,” he replied. “War is death as far as the eye can see. Trenches dug into the ground to hold countless bodies. Nameless, faceless, stripped of nationality. The air is so full of ash that it becomes all you can taste and breathe. The stench, most of all, is overpowering—rot and decay and blood. It stays for hours.”

Sasuke continued to watch him.

“We don’t see each other as human,” Itachi went on. “Only as enemies to crush beneath our power. Yet the act of war will affect thousands of innocent civilians, inflicting pain and suffering on those who must pay with their own lives no matter where they were born. This is the world of shinobi, the world you and I have inherited…” His voice trailed here, until he found it again: “Or so I was promised. What I can be certain of is that it’s a world I never wish to live in.”

And he told Sasuke everything.

—

They made the return journey through the cool, lightless forest in silence at each other’s sides. Occasionally Sasuke would reach for his wrist in passing touch, and each time he answered it with a flex of fine hand bones. Minutes sloughed off his awareness like dead skin, tracked only in the changing direction of moonlight through the canopy.

“If Danzou wasn’t already dead,” Sasuke started, low with ire.

Itachi braceleted his younger brother’s elbow in a delicate hold. “I didn’t tell you,” he said, “to incite anger. I wanted you to understand.”

“How could I not be angry? Itachi, what they did to you, _both_ of them—” Sasuke’s steps hastened as if he couldn’t bear to walk slowly with this burden of emotion. “You should have told me sooner. I could have done something to help.”

“You were a child.”

“So were you,” Sasuke said. “It wasn’t a position they should have put you in.” 

The grasp he maintained on that elbow joint tightened. “Sasuke.”

“You shouldn’t have had to—”

“Sasuke,” came firmer, pulling to veer them off the path and beneath the shield of an oak. “Don’t speak.”

His brother’s teeth clicked as he shut his mouth, sensing the disturbance Itachi had already noticed. They flattened against rough bark and looked in the same direction, two sets of black eyes leeching red. Not far ahead, a figure appeared alone through the trees. They were wreathed in shadow as they walked, pace steady, gait subtle. Itachi held one arm across his brother’s torso in a gesture to stay, then stepped out and intersected the stranger’s path.

“Identify yourself,” he demanded. 

They slowed to a stop. There was no movement or reply.

Suddenly, silver flashed through the air as a kunai was thrown, and the figure lunged to attack. Itachi deflected the first blade with ease and allowed the shinobi to close in on his position. He rooted chakra into the soles of his feet and endured the swinging strike that followed, then switched himself out, reappearing behind the attacker. He cracked a knee into their side with brutal precision.

Quickly recovering, the shinobi staggered back—and Sasuke was there to deliver them violently to the ground.

It was impossible not to see they wore an ANBU mask, but he hadn’t let himself focus on it until Sasuke had them pinned with one foot on their spine. Now he noticed, with cold horror, that it was the oval-shaped rat from the Hokage’s council meeting earlier that afternoon. 

“Restrain them,” he said to Sasuke, “hold their hands, don’t—”

There was a quick click, the liquid whisper of metal, and the shinobi did exactly as he had expected and feared: twisted around and embedded themselves on a blade. A wet, hacking gasp came from the figure in the dirt.

Like Mukai so many years ago. A final, desperate method of self-execution in appeal not to be captured and interrogated.

Sasuke jolted backward. The shinobi bled out with wretched sounds, death rattling to stillness as blood gushed from their body. The squirrelly features of their mask never changed. Only the eyes did, slitted agony through holes as Itachi watched. There was nothing they could do.

After it ended, he leaned and tipped off the mask. The woman underneath was unfamilar.

“A spy?” Sasuke asked quietly. “Whose?”

“I don’t know,” Itachi said. “I will need to report this.”

“Then you’ll have to confess you were out here.”

“Yes.”

He didn’t need to look at his brother to hear the rasping realization on his next exhale. “And the hole in the wall—”

“Likely they will seal it.” Itachi placed the mask back over the dead woman’s face and straightened, earlier’s peace run through with reality’s hot knife. “We will move her body out of the path and hide it in the trees for now. I will go to the guards at the tower and ask them to retrieve it, then return home and notify father of the discovery. A spy within the ANBU isn’t a promising sign. This one had access to a great deal of information. And if there’s one, others will certainly exist.” 

Sasuke’s shoulders sank. From the distance they stood apart Itachi saw the curve of a frown and furrowed brows. Tension knitted his brother’s posture, and it built up to a stagnant height. His voice finally came: “What happens if you don’t report it?”

He stared at Sasuke. “I must.”

“What happens if you don’t?”

“The decision is treason.” Itachi could not keep the scold from his tone. “At best, this spy worked alone, and all of the village’s sensitive information dies with her here. But that scenario is one of low probability. At worst, there are others—perhaps within ANBU as well—with access to shift schedules, rosters, and mission data of Konoha shinobi. This woman was in a room with the Fifth Hokage himself as he addressed concerns of outside conspiracy against the village. To not report this would mean blinding Konoha to a genuine threat—”

“You know he’s leading us into war,” Sasuke said, “you know it already. You don’t want to see it.”

 _You don’t understand_. These unspoken words raged into his mind with runaway dread. _If I see it, then I am the reason why._

If Sasuke viewed him as little more than their father’s dog, that was fine. That was better than being known for what he was: the willing arbiter of war.

He breathed. 

“I thought I could change him,” Itachi said at last, turning away from the body on the ground and the judgment of his younger brother. It was a confession he offered to the night instead. “I thought that, as he took power, I might influence his perspective of Konoha into something better. I longed for the village to eventually accept him.”

He felt Sasuke’s approach, and he didn’t move as arms slid around his waist, a heavy head finding the tuck of his shoulder. “You couldn’t have known this would happen, nii-san.”

“No,” Itachi said. “I did.” Then he slipped from the hold and went for the corpse.

—

At the wall they separated, Sasuke reluctant to leave him even as they both knew the importance of not being seen together. It was better if Sasuke wasn’t associated with the discovery. So he went home first. Itachi explained the situation to the guards in the northwest watchtower, giving them the location of the body they’d need to retrieve, then left.

He submitted a formal report at the ANBU headquarters next. By now the sun loomed up on the horizon, pouring early light across quiet village streets. 

The house was dim and silent when he came through the door, but soon a shuffling sound drew his attention to the kitchen. He found Fugaku preparing to leave for the day.

“Father,” he said.

The man turned, one brow raised, expression expectant. “What is it? I see you’re already dressed. Did you mean to accompany me this morning? It’s good to get a head start.”

“There is something we need to discuss,” Itachi said instead. “I submitted a report—”

“Then I’ll read the report.” His father straightened, shouldering his bag and reaching for the cloak on the chair. “I’m in a hurry, Itachi. We have to prepare for the festival this afternoon. There’s much still to do.”

Itachi hesitated. He’d forgotten completely about the summer festival, and he was startled to realize it was today.

“It’s important,” Itachi pressed, even as he found himself shrinking back from that authority. “We should discuss it as soon as possible.”

Fugaku looked him over, passage of eyes raking nerves over hot coals. “Fine. I expect you in my office within the hour.” His father turned, footsteps carrying him away to the door. It shut with a click. 

Itachi could not tell how long he stood in the kitchen, but the light didn’t change its angle through the blinds, so not much time could have passed. He was next aware of Sasuke’s presence padding across the floor behind him. It felt like a little flame, stroking down his spine as his younger brother fit in against him, warm cheek set squarely between shoulders. Breath fanned the fabric of his collar.

“You haven’t slept,” Sasuke murmured. “Come to bed. He’s gone, so we can lie down for a while.”

“I can’t.” Itachi’s head bowed, and he leaned some of his weight against the supportive pillar of the body behind him as though it was a crutch to prop up tired bones. “Will you be attending the festival?”

“Yeah, but only because you have to.”

That would need to be good enough.

—

The late summer matsuri was an eagerly anticipated event for anyone who called themselves Uchiha. Since the clan’s insurrection, it had expanded to include a wider pool of Konoha civilians on a case-by-case basis with the Hokage’s approval. Seven years of evolution had built up the festival’s reputation such that on the day of its arrival—today—excitement became electrified as guards cordoned off the streets surrounding Naka Shrine.

The festival was meant to herald the season’s change, to acknowledge the passage of time and honor ancestral spirits who had long since left the world. For the Uchiha clan itself, this meaning took symbolic root in fire: to burn out the past, to welcome the future, and to pay fealty to those who made present life possible.

Itachi stood at the top of the shrine steps overlooking the courtyard. At the base, a fire pit had been constructed from wooden beams and barricaded on all sides by steel rails. The pit was impressively sized. It would be the crowning glory of the event, kept burning through the night as visitors paid their respects to a massive, ravenous flame. A small crowd had already gathered around this fixture.

As he watched, one of the Uchiha coordinators approached the guardrail, inhaled deeply, and exhaled fire across the pit. The heat of this katon shimmered golden in the air. It caught kindling, then flared brilliantly, and the pit was ignited. A chorus of cheers erupted from the throng of onlookers. Those holding ceremonial uchiwa came closer to the railing and fanned the orange flames leaping up into the sky. Soon, a grey pillar of smoke rose high.

It was beginning.

Itachi descended the steps and walked the outer courtyard, little more than a dark slip on the perimeter. Lanterns rattled on tall bamboo sticks as a breeze scythed the area. At some point the sun had plunged west, and now shadows lengthened across roads and rooftops as the center of the village transformed into celebration.

Turning toward two recognizable voices, he saw Inabi and Yashiro standing together at one of the entrance gates. Their arms were around each other and they exchanged mugs, calling out to the crowd and laughing in a drunken cheer.

He passed the Uchiha men and went down a less crowded avenue. It was a furtive and blind direction. He didn’t want to be seen. Where they were, his father’s omniscient presence would not be far behind.

Itachi hadn’t seen Fugaku since that morning in the kitchen. He had not gone to the Hokage’s office as promised. Instead he’d wandered straight to the shrine, and stayed there, playing invisible observer to the flurry of festival preparation. 

There was no real reason for this disobedience. He knew his father would find him eventually and scold him, then alert him to another meeting that would discuss the contents of his report, and plans would be set into motion. Reconnaissance. Interrogation. Subterfuge. Assassination. 

An inexorable slide into the dark, one he wouldn’t be able to escape.

It was easier to stand an unmoving column in the deluge of carefree activity around him just a moment longer. Just another night, where he could belong to nothing and no one and the illusion of tomorrow wasn’t yet set. Here, he hardly existed. 

“Itachi!” a familiar voice called, reeling him out of his thoughts. Itachi turned to see Izumi’s approach. She was dressed in kimono, black hair bundled up at the back of her head; her hand held an uchiwa made of white paper. The Uchiha clan’s crest was emblazoned on it in red and black ink. “You’re early. Do you want to get something to eat? Some of the stands have already opened up.”

“Are you here alone, Izumi?”

Something flashed in her eyes, an emotion and merriment he couldn’t identify. “No, actually, I came with a friend. But don’t worry about that, I said I’d take a minute. Come on!”

A hand on his forearm towed him through the vendors. One or two had signs up, lanterns strung and lit on display to reveal trays of baking food: grilled meat on skewers, piles of wheat-colored noodles, fried dough and candied fruits. The air was mixed with these humid scents. 

Itachi was struck by a dizzying spell of nausea almost enough to turn him away.

Izumi glanced at him, frowning. “Are you all right? You look…”

“Nothing, I’m fine. Let’s get something.”

They settled on two sticks of pastel-colored dango and a pouch of watame. Sheltered beneath the awning of a closed business, Itachi picked at one of the first dumplings without appetite. Across from him Izumi licked sugar off her fingers and studied him critically.

“You look like you’re out of it.” When he did not immediately respond, Izumi lifted one hand and waved the uchiwa at his face, puffs stirring the fringe of his hair. “Wake up, wake up. What’s going on?”

“You shouldn’t stay here,” he said. It came out sharp. “You should take your mother and go, Izumi.”

Her face pinched dubiously. “What’s gotten into you? Leave, why?”

“Listen to me and consider it.” He heard the tenor of urgency in his voice and couldn’t suppress how it tainted his tone. “Go anywhere, leave the village and head somewhere safe. Perhaps Tea Country—”

“My mother is a civilian,” Izumi said quietly. “Even if I could protect her, there’s nothing for us in Tea Country. Our whole lives are here in Konoha.” She placed down the paper fan. “What’s really going on, Itachi? You look pale. I know you were on a mission recently, but it’s not good to push yourself…”

“Here,” he said, offering out the skewer of dumplings. Izumi took it gingerly. “Forgive me. I’m just… tired.”

“You should go home and get some rest.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” came the faraway answer as he straightened, bowed his head, and turned to face the street. “Goodbye, Izumi.”

“Bye.” She watched him walk away, concern knitting her features. The sight hung in his vision even after he could no longer see it. 

He didn’t leave. Instead he patrolled the festival like a revenant trapped in the world of the living, restricted to these streets and unable to cross beyond. His mind slewed with black thoughts. He felt delirious, disassociated, as though he was climbing the executioner’s platform again. His surroundings did not seem real. They played out in revelrous puppetry, jingling laughter and voices and the flapping paper of fans… no more than set dressing.

How easily they could be destroyed. He wondered if they knew it. Had that other reality come to pass, the faces around him would be dead at his own hand. He would have slaughtered each and every one of them. And they had no idea, a naivety carried in the celebration that hemmed him in on all sides, ineludible.

Before Itachi realized the trajectory of his route, he had returned to the pit. 

It was now a blazing inferno in the night, a small sun at the center of the village. Its heat was a wall around the fortress of its heart. A sizable audience had gathered, but he could not hear anything coherent over the noisy crackling of wood and embers, so all he did was look, surveying countless black eyes reflected like opaque mirrors in the glare of light.

And his sight landed, inevitably, on his younger brother.

Sasuke had already seen him. He navigated the tangle of bodies with fluid movement, dodging interruption—for those who might recognize him as the Hokage’s second son—as effortlessly as oil through water. Then Sasuke was there, invading his space with a ferocious look. “You don’t even want to be here. So what are you doing?”

Itachi didn’t answer, but he didn’t need to, as an arm snaked around his waist and pulled him off to the fringes of the courtyard. They tucked into the slanted shadow of eaves.

The air was oppressively hot, and his brother was solid and real beside him, an allure of attention and attraction. Their mouths naturally fit together in a kiss. The gravity of that action put hooks through him, so much that Itachi surged and drove Sasuke back against the solid wall of the building. “I was looking for you,” he said as he laid another emboldened kiss on his younger brother’s parted lips, harsh and hard.

Before Sasuke could reply, their gazes locked. The moment froze: Itachi’s eyes had changed. 

Their red centers were pinwheels. 

Caught by the veil of genjutsu, Sasuke made a desperate gasping sound as his mind was dragged down into illusion, full weight collapsing against Itachi. It lasted three short seconds. Yet it visibly wrecked Sasuke, whose head rolled back to show his throat. He was trembling. Saliva pooled at the corner of his mouth. Itachi didn’t hesitate to scoop his younger brother up into a bridal carry that drew him protectively close to his chest. Then he leapt onto the nearest roof and cut a path out and away from the shrine’s festivities, the fire’s heat on his back.

He didn’t stop until he reached the veranda of their home, and even here he held him, pressing kisses to the top of Sasuke’s head between strangely affectionate shushes. _It’s okay, calm down, otouto. Don’t worry. It’s only nii-san._ Sasuke keened and squirmed as though to twist free, but loose and exhausted muscles couldn’t accomplish the task. His fingers formed shaking fists in the front of Itachi’s clothes. 

“I have you,” he said to his brother, carrying him through the door on the porch. “You’re here with me now.”

“Nii-san, what— I—”

“Don’t speak if it’s too difficult. Your mind and body are suffering the effects of time distortion within the genjutsu. You’re overwhelmed,” he said gently. He moved into the living room, and there he lowered Sasuke onto the floor, dragging over a blanket to put beneath them. “Let me see you.”

Peeling Sasuke’s flak jacket off, he watched his brother sprawl out obediently. Quick hands divested him of the rest of his clothes. Sasuke was a panting mess, skin flushed red, sweat beading over ribs and a flat, tense abdomen. In the eternity of those three seconds, he had come immediately. The evidence painted Sasuke’s inner thighs slick and wet. His cock lay there spent and pink and soft. 

It made sense, given Itachi had flung him into Tsukuyomi. He’d endured what felt thirty-six hours of being taken apart in his older brother’s hands. Fucked, over and over, to the very brink of his stamina.

Itachi’s palms followed the impulse of dragging themselves down the long, lean shape of Sasuke’s body, coaxing knees to fall apart as he slid on top. “You may feel sensitive for some time,” he murmured, branding a line of possessive kisses across Sasuke’s collarbone. “Try to relax.”

It was lascvious impulse to lower his head and clean the sticky seed from his brother’s skin with his tongue. It required him to push into the crux of legs where this lewd display was meant for him. Sasuke was limp and obedient to the illusion he had already been fucked several times by now. He whimpered, legs twitching and hips displacing the blanket in weak, overstimulated escape.

Itachi didn’t wait. He left his brother on the floor, head hazy with lust, and brought back oil before proceeding to do exactly what the illusion of himself had done in Tsukuyomi: he pried Sasuke’s hole open with rough knuckles and watched as his little brother fell to pieces all over again. He wished to memorize all of it. He studied the damp black lashes, the hot color of cheeks, the open drooling mouth, the ruin of concentration with every whine of his own name. _Itachi, Itachi, please, Itachi._

He greased oil over his own cock, folded Sasuke’s knees to his chest, and slid in until he was fully flush to the curve of Sasuke’s ass. It was so easy. His brother’s resilient body could take another fuck, this one manifested in reality rather than imaginary dream. 

He took Sasuke’s body for all it could stand. The room became nothing more than the slap of skin, their hot shared breath, the sobs from his brother’s slack mouth, the black night outside, the perversion and adoration made once more physical between them. There was no break. He forced Sasuke into a blistering orgasm, and then continued to fuck him through it, until Sasuke began to beg and thrash under his weight. That tight resulting clench on his dick wrung out his own end like a pair of hands around his throat. When he came, everything went white and empty.

They lay together in the gauzy aftermath, beginning the slow return to lucidity. The blanket had tangled around Sasuke’s shoulders and head where he’d been dragged across the floor to meet Itachi’s brutal thrusts. They held each other in a mutually bruising embrace. The night slanted deep and dark through the house around them, untouched stillness on windowsills and through doorways. Itachi’s last memory was his lips on his brother’s sweaty forehead and the half-imagined, half-unreal words, “I love you,” before he fell into forgotten sleep.

—

An unfamiliar world clotheslined his consciousness into sudden waking. He became aware first of a warm and naked body against his own, steady pulse matched by fanned breath. Then he noticed the cool breeze on his face from some unknown source.

When Itachi stirred and looked up, terror coiled so far inside of him that it fed a brand new fear.

He saw the screen door of the veranda had been left open overnight. He saw the indigo sky through its gap, signalling the twilight between night and day. He saw the looming shadow of his father standing above them. The crime was plain to witness in their bare bodies wrapped around one another, this inexcusable evidence on display.

The man’s expression was glazed with ice. It was one he hardly recognized.

“What am I looking at?” Fugaku said. “What is this?”

He could feel Sasuke stirring in his arms, though he didn’t dare look away from those two red eyes. “Father—”

“ _What is this_?”

The movement forward was sudden. He didn’t have time to react. Itachi watched numbly as one large hand took Sasuke by the scalp and hauled him across the floor, then flung him down. Sasuke let out a short, pained gasp as he caught himself on hands and knees. He was now wide awake.

Itachi moved to stand. “Father, wait—”

“Stay right there,” was Fugaku’s iron command. The man towered between his sons. “Don’t move, Itachi, I don’t want to hear a single word. No excuses. Nothing out of your mouth unless I ask for it, do you understand?”

He stared in mute shock. He was dimly aware of Sasuke’s shuffled movements to dress himself. He didn’t attempt the same. 

“I should have known,” Fugaku spat out. “From the first time we allowed you two to share the same bed… I knew it was wrong, but I was too lenient when I allowed it to continue. I believed in you as good children.”

“That isn’t—”

“I told you not to speak!” Fugaku shouted. His face was shadowed by the light at his back. “Do you think I am a stupid old man? Do you not see how much I’ve sacrificed for both of you all these years? I’ve raised you, nurtured and guided you, gave you the very best of the world, all while leading both the village and our clan… and this is how you’ve repaid me?”

He advanced on Itachi.

“You spit on your mother’s grave with this, this… filthy act.” Fugaku’s face was flushed and swollen in the height of fury, whites of eyes gleaming in a skull. “How long has this gone on behind your own father’s back? How long have you willfully disrespected me?”

When Itachi didn’t react, Fugaku struck him across the face. He didn’t block it. His head whipped to the side, tasting rust on his tongue.

Sasuke intervened, seizing Fugaku by the forearm and twisting it in retaliation. The man grunted and allowed himself to be pulled, then swung into that momentum and sent Sasuke to the ground with a powerful blow to the head.

Itachi could feel the thud rattle the tatami mat as his brother’s body met the ground. He pushed to his knees. “Stop, father—”

“And _you_ ,” came the venomous hiss to Sasuke, “you stubborn, foolish, disobedient child. You have always disappointed me. I dismissed your weakness because I had your brother, but now I see that was another mistake. I should have been harder on you. Perhaps then your mother would still be alive.”

The impact of this statement warped Sasuke’s demeanor into a cold void, its anger rooted deeper than words would reach and manifested out of years of resentment. “I stopped trying to make you happy a long time ago.” He pushed himself upright. “What happened to mom is on you more than me. It’s because of you they hated us.”

“How dare you,” Fugaku spat, tone flatlining. “As expected, you have no understanding of the difficulty of my position. _How dare you_.”

When it seemed he would strike Sasuke again—or make the attempt—the man went suddenly still.

“I see now what must be done. What should have been done years ago. You will need to be separated,” their father said. “The village is in a precarious state. We must keep its best interests in mind if we hope to succeed against our enemies, no matter what.”

Itachi curled his fingers into the blanket in his lap, half-kneeling. Every nerve in his body felt dead and unresponsive.

“I won’t leave Itachi,” Sasuke hissed. 

“You have no choice in this decision.” Fugaku laughed, a crazed humor. “You surrendered that choice the moment you fucked your own brother.”

Neither son spoke.

In that stillness, Fugaku demanded: “Do you have the barest grasp of what your brother has done? What he was _prepared_ to do?”

“I know,” Sasuke said coolly, glaring, and now his eyes were red to match their father’s. “All I see is a pathetic old man trying to control a child who couldn’t say no.”

“ _He was going to kill us all!_ ” Fugaku roared. “If I hadn’t shown him reason, he would have murdered his entire clan. His _family_. Has he told you this? His mad plan? No, I stopped it, I saved _all of us_ from a naive child’s decision, a power that he should never have possessed!”

Itachi felt nothing in the wake of this sore, ugly tirade. He felt nothing beneath that judgment except the crystallized realization that his father had never forgiven him for the truth.

Even though he had chosen the clan, even after all the blood at his feet—in the Uchiha name, against the village itself—his father had never forgotten and never forgiven what almost was. So nothing he did had mattered in his father’s eyes. 

It was an eternal penance, an impossible atonement. It was one that would never be satisfied. 

Itachi, finally, drew himself to his feet.

But it was his brother who spoke first. 

“Maybe he should have,” Sasuke said, tall and unwavering across from their father. “Maybe he should have done it, so the village wouldn’t have become what you turned it into—”

Fugaku moved, lightning-quick and red-eyed, took his youngest son by the shoulders and drove him back down to the floor. Sasuke made a winded sound. There Fugaku pinned him, hands closing around his throat.

Protest strangled out of Sasuke as he twisted, attempting to fight in a vicious struggle that overtaxed the muscles of his body.

Itachi was not aware of himself coming forward, only that one moment his sightline hung near the floor and the next he was closer, overlooking the violent scene: his father was wringing the life out of his little brother. 

The room had fallen into darkness. He saw nothing but what was in front of him. He felt emptied of everything. He was in the room again with the council leaders, and their lives sat in his hands like porcelain cups, shattered by closing fists.

Heat took all of the air out of the room in a blistering firestorm. Unimaginably hotter than any ordinary flame, the first spark was invisible until it burst into existence: a ribbon of black wove across the man’s broad shoulders. It flared, caught fabric and flesh, then roared into starving life. A scream rose up. It was a sound of animal agony. Inhuman, a voice he couldn’t recognize, screaming in pain. Then he saw the man (his father, _his father_ ) engulfed in pitch fire.

The body was kicked off as Sasuke scrambled back unscathed. He was panting, wild eyes turned in Itachi’s direction, but Itachi didn’t look back. He forced himself to watch his father burn to death in front of him. 

The figure eventually collapsed, consumed by the unbearable heat of impossible fire. Itachi’s cheek tickled; he wiped under his right eye, fingers coming away bright red. It was then he noticed a dried smear under his left.

Silence reigned immutable over the room, interrupted only by a constant low crackle. The fire ate until nothing was left—no fabric, no scorched bone, only a pile of ash. Then it spread out onto the floor, spiderlines of black flame across the tatami mats like a living creature unleashed upon the territory. 

Even after Itachi closed his right eye, it continued to blaze. The damage was done.

His brother came to his side without a word and dressed him, hands a cool contrast to the room’s blistering temperature as Sasuke tugged on his shirt, pants, arm guards, shoes. “We need to go. Now.”

Itachi looked at his brother deliriously. He felt himself drop. Sasuke was there, hefting him into solid arms, a mirror of their earlier reversed positions.

“You’re exhausted,” Sasuke whispered against the crown of his head. “This was you, wasn’t it? Your eyes.”

He managed a wordless groan into the curve of Sasuke’s throat. He thought he could feel the inflamed, swollen skin against his forehead where their father’s hands were minutes ago. 

The fire put off the most light now, but that was meager, inky and ethereal flickering over paper screens and windows. Its heat was suffocating in such an enclosed space. It stung the back of his throat, caused him to cough. Sasuke brought him out onto the veranda. 

They did not speak again for some time. The world was stirring around them, dawn tinting its first silvers across a distant horizon and leeching out the darkest azures of night. Sasuke carried him in a careful, well-picked route to the northwest watchtower, to the hole in the wall: there was yellow ribboning around it to mark the area off-limits, but it hadn’t been sealed. Sasuke hauled him through this and to the other side. 

Itachi eventually stirred, eyelids flickering. His head was a single pulse of pain. “We can’t leave.”

“We just killed the Hokage,” was his brother’s gentle reply as he set Itachi down on the grass. “We’re as good as exiled. From the clan, from the village.”

“I killed him,” he said. “You can still return.”

“Don’t—” Sasuke cut off, ragged. “Don’t even suggest that.”

He lifted his head and stared blearily, chest aching as though a weight pressed it down. “We cannot abandon Konoha.”

“They won’t trust you, Itachi.” Sasuke’s voice came further away as he ducked into the underbrush, then returned with something in his arms: two packed bags. “They’ll be glad to get rid of us.”

An alarm sirened up into the grey veil of dawn. When they looked, they could see a chimney of smoke pouring skyward as if stabbed directly into the heart of Konoha itself. It jolted him into better lucidity, hands planted and arms bending in an attempt to hinge upright.

“The village is vulnerable, I have to stop it, I have do something—”

“Nii-san, you tried. You’ve tried this whole time. You spent years trying to stop this.” Sasuke returned to his side, going to knees in the dirt and pulling him into a embrace. Sasuke kissed him, then kissed him again, each a reverent and solemn promise. “Maybe you can’t. Maybe it’s just going to happen, and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

Itachi stopped moving. Those arms took him tighter into a protective hold, and he felt Sasuke’s chin nudge the top of his head. He wasn’t sure how long they stayed like that. He stared at the rising smoke until his vision swam out of focus, details slurring, and he couldn’t tell whether it was the fault of sharingan or whether they were genuine tears. There was no sound around them but the distant, crying siren. Not even the trees stirred with wind.

Eventually they both climbed to their feet, gathered the bags, and began to walk.

He didn’t know how long they traveled in a straight line through the forest, unspeaking. The day came to slow color around them, light slicing pale streamers across the earth with a vengeance. When at last they took a hill for better vantage and the trees opened around it, their eyes—the same identical color—surveyed the village from afar. 

Amaterasu was a hot, black scar beneath the new sun. It blazed in the area of the Uchiha compound where the property of their family home was placed, now reduced to broken beams of wood and concrete. The rest of Konoha was untouched. It was as though the fire refused to cross that boundary, keeping its rage contained to one location. The alarm had faded to an eerie emptiness. The sky was too clear and too blue against the strange, majestic phenomena below it.

“How long is it going to burn?” Sasuke asked.

“Until it’s done.”

“Can you put it out?” His brother’s gaze found him. “Can they?”

“It’s fine,” Itachi said in a murmur. He reached for Sasuke’s hand, leaning their bodies together. “It won’t hurt anyone else.”

They must have stood together on the hill’s peak for close to an hour to witness the destruction of Amaterasu. It burned tirelessly through the remainder of the structure, an intentional creep of dark flame, until it finally began to tire and flicker out. By then the sun had crowned the canopy surrounding them and washed warmth over their skin. Itachi blinked sore eyes, still leaning on his brother, and squeezed their joined hands almost to an ache. He turned them around to the path: down the other side of the hill, through the dense knot of trees, and away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who has commented and given kudos, I cherish all of your feedback. And thank you for reading this fic! I hope to write more of these boys in the future, so if you're interested in seeing some of that Process, feel free to follow me on twitter @ unholyknives. I also just hungrily retweet a bunch of beautiful fanart if ya into that.
> 
> Special shout out to Ash for proofing this while thing for me, you are a hero.


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